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The dream factory and reality

Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood
Regissør: Quentin Tarantino
(USA 2019)

MOVIE ABOUT MOVIE: Quentin Tarantino's new movie is a grand and captivating tribute to Hollywood, against a not-so-escapist backdrop of hippie time, the Vietnam War and the Manson family's misdeeds.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

No single filmmaker was in the nineties as much as Quentin Tarantino. He debuted feature film as screenwriter and director in 1992 with the independently produced Reservoir Dogs, which received a lot of attention at the Sundance Film Festival. Two years later he won the Gold Palm in Cannes for the Miramax-funded Pulp Fiction. It's hard to imagine the nineties classics Boogie Nights, Trainspotting or Fight Club had been made without these two films.

Around the same time came True Romance og Natural Born Killers, directed by Tony Scott and Oliver Stone, respectively, with the script by Tarantino. These two also became immediate cult successes. Although they would have been significantly different if he had directed them themselves, they helped to consolidate Tarantino's position as a refreshing, new narrative voice in American film, with an almost unparalleled "coolness". A film narrator who was neither afraid to shock with violence and language use (especially creating extensive use of n-word reactions) or entertaining – preferably with the same ingredients. And preferably to the tones of understated seventies tunes.

Dialogues and digressions

Where other filmmakers had learned to keep the dialogue to a minimum ("show, don't tell!"), Tarantino let his characters discuss Madonna songs, hamburgers, and foot massages in long, well-written and particularly witty dialogue sequences. And it was not only in the dialogues Tarantino allowed digressions. His films often took various narrative detours, which equally strengthened the narrative as a whole. In addition, he had obviously come up with Jean-Luc Godard's statement that a movie must have a beginning, middle and an end – but not necessarily in that order. For example, Reservoir Dogs a "heist" movie that never shows the robbery it is about (with a narrative structure inspired by Kubrick's The Killing), while Pulp Fiction nonchronologically switches between different stories that influence and complement each other to a unique whole.

Throughout his filmography, as with premieres Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood Counting nine feature films as a director, Tarantino has proven himself as a filmmaker with a knowledgeable and at the same time very playful approach to film history. The starting point seems to be a fierce enthusiasm about the film's genres and narratives – without appearing particularly academic in that way. Nevertheless, Tarantino, with all its intertextual and pop-cultural references, is possibly the most prominent of all time postmodern filmmaker. In the films, he draws clear exchanges on everything from the B-movies of the seventies via classic westerns to French new wave films. And much, much more.

Tarantino's cinematic universe can in many ways be regarded as a tribute to fiction, as a place where everything is possible.

Second to last movie

Tarantino has announced that he will only direct ten feature films. He should not have decided what the latest movie will be, but recently stated that it will probably become more "epilogue-like". It is perhaps unavoidable, all the time movie number nine is experienced as a culmination of his entire career project. IN Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood he leaves the fascination for popular culture in general and film in particular at the center of the action, which takes place in Hollywood during the 1969 wrestling year. TV series to be consistently hired for villain roles, and his stuntman and buddy Rick Booth (Brad Pitt).

Pitt and DiCaprio.

This phrase allows Tarantino to create and recreate fictional as well as existing film and television productions, against a backdrop of the Vietnam War and the hippie era. Further in the foreground is Charles Manson and his so-called family, and one of the film's central characters is the young actor Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) – who most will know was killed by Manson's "disciples."

However, like all Tarantino's films, lets not Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood the audience forgets that it is just a movie, for example using narrative voice and text posters. Tarantino's cinematic universe can in many ways be considered a tribute to fiction, as a place where everything is possible. Many will also remember that in his World War II movie Inglourious Basterds to all intents and purposes, Adolf Hitler was killed in an assault, fittingly and ironically in a movie theater. In other words, if the films contain historical figures, they do not have to meet the same fate as they did in reality – without questioning whether this film gives his version of Tate a "happy ending". On the other hand, it should be said that the film and actress Robbie draw a warm and sympathetic portrait of her, especially in the sequence where she goes to the cinema to check the audience's response to her own efforts in the Dean Martin movie The Wrecking Crew. Unlike many of Tarantino's characters, she is only awarded a few replies, but Tate still stands out as a very memorable character.

Entertainment only?

For some, Tarantino's films may appear as a purely entertaining surface, without any depth or substance. However, it can be argued that the films consistently engage in discussion with the audience about their relationship to film violence, as well as to fiction more generally. One can be appalled at the ease of the portrayal of John Travolta's character in Pulp Fiction accidentally the head of the co-passenger shoots in a car, but this ease is also the point. A point that is not solely humorous – but, by all means, so too. By the way, do not forget that Tarantino with the film D (2012) directed almost as much criticism of the United States of slavery as the contemporary 12 Years a Slave.

The Pulp Fiction limited to referring to real people in the form of waiters dressed up as Buddy Holly or Marilyn Monroe, thus playing Once Upon A Time… on brutal, real killings. In the film, the certainty of what actually happened as a tension-building element works, while at the same time this subplot leads the mind to more contemporary terrorist acts – which is presumably also intentional on the part of the filmmaker. One can think that it is distasteful to freely dictate tragedies from reality, and it is easy to come up with more recent examples that could hardly have received the same treatment. But Manson already has some form of myth status in popular culture, in addition to these killings being left as a symbolic point of the optimistic and somewhat naïve "flowerpower" era.

In this case, Tarantino gets away with his reality poetry anyway, and has even made one of his very best films (Big Words, I know!). Once Upon A Time… is packed with beautiful details, references to other popular culture (including the director's own films), sparkling dialogue, intense music, intricate and intelligent storytelling – as well as a fetishistic look on women's feet. In other words, everything that characterizes Tarantino's cinematography. This time in an epic that lifts the fiction even in the foreground, in a way that gives the fiction importance – even in all its entertainment-hungry stupidity.

Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood has its Norwegian cinema premiere on Friday 16 August.

Aleksander Huser
Aleksander Huser
Huser is a regular film critic in Ny Tid.

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