Quentin Tarantino
Jackie Brown

Already in his first film, one of the most dazzling and important debuts in the history of cinema, Tarantino made clear what his ideas were, what his poetic, authorial, and programmatic manifesto was.

"The important things to remember are the details, the details make the story believable!”

In Reservoir Dogs, whose first scene is the famous explanation of the hidden meaning of Like a Virgin, the undercover cop Mr. Orange is instructed (the "commode story") on the importance of details and immersion, as if he were a new Marlon Brando with the Stanislavski method, to make his character believable and thus complete the mission.

"Come on, let's get into character," Jules will say to Vincent in Pulp Fiction.
All of Tarantino's cinema is immersion, storytelling - what could be more cult than the story of Butch's father's watch? - storytelling. Fassbender infiltrating the Nazis in Inglourious Basterds, only to be betrayed by an unimaginable detail, the way of making the "three" with his fingers.

In The Hateful Eight, Major Marquis invents the story of the letter received from President Lincoln, no less. And to make it touching and thus, intrinsically, authentic, he leaves a true touch of the author at the end.

"My dear old Mary calls me, so I guess it's time to go to bed."
"My dear old Mary, that's a nice touch," concludes the film the sheriff in pectore of Red Rock, Chris Mannix, congratulating the Major on the style of the fake letter.

Tarantino's cinema is a set of Chinese boxes, of narratives and citations, within other narratives and citations. Of fictions. Tarantino's cinema is a charade.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood will make all this more explicit, giving a definitive shape to the work of the American genius originally from Tennessee.

In his films, the characters wink at the viewer, go to the rhythm of the soundtrack, are part of a game of massacre moved from above, by the Deus ex machina. Which is the director himself.

But the director/author also reflects on himself, indirectly. Even when starting from a subject not his own, in that single case that is Jackie Brown. Indeed, perhaps this unique non-original film, adapted from Ellmore Leonard, is the one that shows stronger, more intimate, and deeper existential reflections.

Speaking of which, of details: Tarantino, when filming Jackie Brown, is 34 years old. The age when you are still young, but where you also see for the first time concretely and closely, the end of the golden age and the prospect of maturity, as well as of subsequent aging.

And this is what his third film is about. Of realism, of melancholy and the passing years, of vanished youth. Without, however, this leading to self-pity, quite the opposite. One lives, if anything, the awareness, transforming it into a pretext for redemption.

The reflection on time will return, forcefully, in the aforementioned Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which in its fairy-tale and uchronian parable, of imaginary redemption of History, speaks above all of the bitterness of the sunset boulevard, always with melancholy but once again with the final retribution for those who have spent a life behind, hidden, a double of an already secondary protagonist.

Cinema is a representation of the human condition, but precisely because of the nature of images, the only art capable of stopping time, sculpting it, thus beating the laws of physics. The art of transfiguration, of transposition, of interpretation. Tarantino understood this from the start and staged it through the meticulousness of the details.