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A few years ago, Quentin Tarantino announced, with a typical stop-the-press greatness, that he would officially stop filming after completing his tenth feature film. It remains to be seen if the great rock star author of American cinema will succeed in this early retirement plan, but the reason behind this project seems to be sincere: if he went out while staying at the top, he would cement his legacy and only start never the long slide in the decreasing returns that some filmmakers experience as they get older. First in Cannes, 25 years later pulp Fiction hit the festival (and film culture in general) as a hypodermic needle to the heart, the ninth funky, unusual, sporadically sublime feature film of Tarantino, Once upon a time … in Hollywood (Grade: B +), shows no revealing sign of the loss of an artist: QT keeps total control of his art from the first to the last minute. And yet, its creator anxiety, the one that seems to have inspired a premature exit strategy, is written throughout the film. It is an elegy for a certain age of American pop culture that could well concern the screenwriter-director struggling with his own inevitable obsolescence.
Set in 1969, Once upon a time … in Hollywood takes place at the end of an era, a great moment of transition for the entertainment industry, while New Hollywood rushed to kill the old. In one of his usual, bright, powerhouse and star-studded productions, Tarantino presents Leonardo DiCaprio – whose once unblemished baby face has finally begun showing his first real signs of middle age – under the pseudonym Rick Dalton , a giant of the world. small screen. Dalton, whose career peaked with a popular 1950s TV show titled Premium Law, has been reduced to the role of star star prime time, is kicking ass each week for young actors to cringe on the heel, which, according to a movie producer (Al Pacino), will have "an effect psychological on the the public perceives [him]. "Dalton, in other words, is a has-was whose days in the spotlight are numbered. If he was a real person, Tarantino would have already tried to revive his career by offering him a role back in one of his own westerns.
Dalton spends most of his days driving around Los Angeles with his friend Cliff Booth (another star movie star, Brad Pitt). Booth is more than ever. his only real pretext for celebrity is the rumor that he would have killed his wife and would have pulled himself out, a bit of history to allow Tarantino to do nothing. He is also a more mythical and impassive character than Dalton, making him an ideal candidate for Pitt, who has not found such a strong and slightly annoying application for his age, outlaw, since The assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford, another film about the death of one era at the hands of another. Booth and Dalton sometimes frequent the luxurious Hollywood House in Hollywood, which is right next to Roman Polanski's and Sharon Tate's house. If the film has a third main character, it is the very non-fictional Tate (Margot Robbie), who deals with her own life on the edge of the hairy story. Tate, of course, was murdered in 1969 by the Manson family (Hollywood was to open on the anniversary of his death in August, until coldness reigns or the outcry aroused), and the film retains the possibility that this impending tragedy will spread everywhere.
It is a vague but persistent note of terror in what is otherwise one of Tarantino's most sinister, even casual images – a "hangout movie", to use his own language, spanning sections of the California Highway and blending behind the scenes of the studio. The director has not plunged his foot so deeply into the real world for a few decades. In the years since Jackie Brown– perhaps his masterpiece, for the money of this critic – Tarantino has mainly walked into a kind of sandbox of his own creation, playing with the conventions of war movies, kung -fu, images of samurai, westerns, chamber mysteries, slashers, racing movies, and more. The Hollywood of his Hollywood is not quite "real" either: Dalton's fictional career offers Tarantino the opportunity to do another Grindhouse in miniature, offering excerpts from imaginary projects (including a hilarious series of fake spaghetti westerns), though the soundtrack soundtrack – Rolling Stones, Simon and Garfunkel, Deep Purple – keeps the movie tied to its day and place. Tarantino is nevertheless focused on the film industry itself. His characters, at least, are real people this time, in many ways.
Like some of his earlier work, Once upon a time … in Hollywood often looks more like a set of big scenes – a cinematic movie rock album skillfully sequenced – than a quite satisfying and coherent story. It's a bit heavy and loose and episodic, wandering in tangents, like a flashback where Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) tells rhapsodic about Muhammad Ali, before being a little improbably thrown into a collector's car by the shitty stuntman which states Pitt. But there is a long straight line through the two hours and 40 minutes of tranquility of the film. It's a deep respect and empathy for the actors and their relationship to their art, their reputation and their declining celebrity – which is not so shocking on the part of Tarantino, who likes to launch rescue operations for the stars faded. In a beautiful passage in the middle of the film, he leaves Dalton on the set of a Western TV movie, making him swap for camcorders with one of his effective replacements (the real TV-western star Timothy Olyphant) and arguing with a child actor who can represent the new school of interpretive methods invading the industry at the time; The sequence pulls DiCaprio's character from the humiliation of a licked take to the ecstasy of a take. And despite the preemptive discomfort that people have felt about Tate's role in history, HollywoodPerhaps the most moving moment is the scene where the actor attends a public screening of The crew in demolitionand Tarantino frames Robbie's face in close-up, absorbing Tate's reactions to the crowd's reaction to his scenes. His exaltation, his deep sense of validation, are they so different from those that splashed Tarantino's face during the six-minute standing ovation that followed the first night yesterday?
All in, Once upon a time … in Hollywood continues to remind us of the specter of imminent danger: the Manson girls, walking around the border of history, until they enter it. The movie works so nicely as a slice of celebrity life that I almost wish this item was not part of its model, or at least that Tarantino brought the two shutters together in a way that seemed less flippant, defensive and, luscious. (To say more, it might upset the director, who implored the critics not to spoil the movie 's secrets in advance – a reasonable request, in my opinion, although some French journalists were mocking each other. yesterday during the press screening at the press screening urged to postpone.) with Hollywood until I did not really do it, but even his missteps are pretty fascinating, as an expression of the generational malaise of Tarantino. Once very popular, he is now part of an older guard who witnessed the transformation of a hollywood that helped transform it. The future is the enemy. In Once upon a time … in Hollywoodit looks a lot like deadly teenagers.
Tomorrow: Bong Joon-ho drops him from the park with a crazy and ingenious prank on class disparity. In addition, more competition titles, those of Ira Sachs, Xavier Dolan and Arnaud Desplechin.
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