Quentin Tarantino proves once again the master of violence without weight

IT WAS ONCE A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD (MA, 161 minutes) Directed by Quentin Tarantino ★★★★

Halfway to Once upon a time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino, Sharon Tate (played by Margot Robbie) goes to the movies. Specifically, she goes to one of his own movies, espionage espionage by Phil Karlson in 1968 The crew in demolition.

Inside the theater, she goes to the house, takes off her boots and places her bare feet on the seat in front of her, while smiling at her counterpart on the screen (the real Tate, not Robbie) as if the couple was sharing a private joke.

You could say she's having fun. The same goes for Tarantino: there seems to be little doubt that every detail of the painting has been chosen to give him pleasure, and we are allowed to attend a private ritual of personal gratification, to more A level.

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This is one of the secret centers of a very long film, which often seems to be only secret centers. Many of these take the form of breaks where the drama is deliberately held in check, thus leaving Tarantino more opportunities to play with cars, clothes, hairstyles, commercials, TV shows and movies than he associates with the Hollywood of 1969 (and thus with his own childhood of the 1960s).

There is a story, or at least the promise or appearance of another. Taken for face value, the film is an old – fashioned buddy film, built on the easy relationship between two stars close to each other: Leonardo DiCaprio in the role of Rick Dalton, a actor erased in televised westerns, and Brad Pitt in the role of Cliff Booth, Rick's double stuntman, dog to body, and seemingly only friend.

Tarantino allows us to be seduced by these characters while looking at them with a certain ambivalence. Rick is a crybaby and a drunk, egocentric and more than a bit naive man (one could almost imagine him as the cool-faced cowboy actor played by Alden Ehrenreich in the Coen brothers Hi, Caesar! some decades).

Cliff is the tough guy that Rick can not claim, with a casual attitude that has nothing to prove. But not everyone likes it and part of the movie's game plan is to let us guess what kind of man we are dealing with.

Hipsters, but not quite hippies, the two men are increasingly displaced in the new Hollywood represented by Tate, who moved to the next house in Hollywood with her husband Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha), the sexiest director in town.

This adds a note of dread to the movie's light comedy – since a spectator can not ignore that Tate, along with several others, is murdered the same year by followers of cult leader Charles Manson (Damon Herriman ).

The encounter between fiction and facts is the crux of the film, no matter how much time we put in it. More specifically, Tarantino is determined to oppose the playful and mild violence of gender narratives to the traumatic violence of real history – as he did before in films like Basterds without glory and Django Unchained.

Despite the obsessive accuracy of the details of the period, it is immediately obvious that it is not a literal and realistic recreation of a place and a time, but rather a dream or hallucination troubled. Or a fairy tale, as we might deduce from the title – which pays tribute to Sergio Leone's visionary Once upon a time in America, a "piece of memory" in the big sense.

As always, Tarantino's goal is to increase the contradictions rather than solve them, thus letting us guess where he is the silly scholar for whom he is so often caught or where he is. Play a game deeper than most of us can see.

How willing is he to explore what could be under the many surface pleasures of the film? It may be a simple escape that he avoids confronting Manson's figure, who could be understood as an awful analog for a director, orchestrating crimes while keeping his hands clean.

For her part, Zoe Bell, stunt coordinator for the Kiwis, is a cameo who, since her lead role in the 2007 film Tarantino Proof of death, has increasingly assumed the role of his consciousness – is one of many general indications of the darkness that lurks throughout the glamorous surface of Hollywood.