Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood

ONCE UPON A TIME... IN HOLLYWOOD   **

Quentin Tarantino

2019

IDEA:  In 1969 Hollywood, an actor of TV westerns struggles with his declining stardom, while his stuntman happens upon a dangerous cult.

BLURB:  Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is an extravaganza of fetishes that finds Tarantino applying his signature brand of historical revisionism to a 1960s Hollywood engorged with his pop-cultural obsessions. Everywhere in the lavish production design and soundtrack is a signifier of some beloved media, a billboard, poster, radio advertisement, or television clip elevated to nostalgic fetish object. Within this fastidiously reconstructed milieu wander DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton and Pitt’s Cliff Booth, avatars of a faded Hollywood glory. They, too, are fetish objects, ego ideals – especially Pitt’s macho golden boy – Tarantino uses to save his bygone era. The same goes for Robbie’s Tate, but with less dimension: the director is uncomfortably content with simply employing her as a symbol of mythic pureness and optimism, a beautiful doll to be swathed in the protective wrapping of an imaginary past. Although the nostalgia is gratuitous in a way one expects from this director and this idiom, it does yield a richly realized world; one that feels like the fairytale crucible of Tarantino’s birth, an anatomy of the components that have formed his pop-culture-constituted, Frankenstein’s monster identity. Yet too often, Once Upon a Time… turns its nostalgia into a reactionary project of narrative fetishism, an act of denial with troubling implications. Not only does Tarantino crassly conflate the Manson family with the hippie counterculture, he reductively uses them as a catch-all metaphor to signal undesirable social change. And by the time he gets to his inevitable violent fantasy, Tarantino shows how limited his creative abilities are in processing realities that call for more than a bloody intervention, and how ultimately incapable he is of leaving his juvenile worldview in the past.

When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism

WHEN EVENING FALLS ON BUCHAREST OR METABOLISM   ***

Corneliu Porumboiu

2013

IDEA:  A filmmaker struggles to get his film made while having an affair with one of his actresses.

BLURB:  When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism is nothing so much as a self-reflexive critique of a self-important character, a film self-consciously designed to deflate its own protagonist’s dogmatic, self-centered worldview. That’s a lot of “selfs,” which indicates how much of a hermetic, closed-circuit conceptual exercise Porumboiu’s film is. But if it doesn’t exactly look beyond itself, When Evening Falls… nevertheless stimulates in its meta-textual games, and delights in how it uses its form to poke fun at itself and the aforementioned protagonist’s creative ego. As the hunched, black turtleneck-clad Paul, Bogdan Dumitrache embodies the pedantry and pretentiousness of a filmmaker who believes in only one mode and method of cinema, tied to a specious notion of realism. But when he’s not undermining his own stringent philosophies, Porumboiu is doing it for him, deploying formalism to wryly contradict the pompous director’s dictates. So, when Paul says he’s shooting on film due to the productive restrictions it imposes, mentioning that film can record no longer than 11 minutes continuously, Porumboiu shoots in long takes around that length to underline the arbitrariness of such material limits. And when Paul suggests the supreme naturalism of long takes, Porumboiu shows us just how mannered they can be. By focusing on and believing only in what he can control in his film, Paul fails to account for all the other contingencies that impact his project. Ironically, it’s the footage of his endoscopy that’s the most “real,” successful thing he produces, and it’s not even his. When the film ends by having Alina take over the center of both Paul’s and Porumboiu’s films, the image of the solipsistic man is finally expelled, symbolically supplanted by the more flexible body, and mind, he disavows.

Private Property

PRIVATE PROPERTY   ***1/2

Leslie Stevens

1960

IDEA:  Two drifters with eyes on an upscale suburban woman infiltrate her Beverly Hills home.

BLURB:  Bolstering its nervy B-movie rawness with aesthetic elegance and psychological realism, Private Property is so potent precisely because it takes its sordid premise so seriously. As a result, what is essentially the stuff of tawdry erotic fiction becomes a vehicle for filtering the suburban discontent of postwar America, its classed and gendered frictions ideally suited to the economic desperation and psychosexual mania of noir. As the ruffians who weasel their way into a woman’s Beverly Hills mansion, Warren Oates and Corey Allen are excellent at embodying shades of masculine entitlement as well as curdling sexual frustration. Allen, playing the ringleader, is especially effective, his weary bravado and pathetic entreaties adding an undertow of vulnerability to the film’s portrait of violent male disaffection. And as the bourgeois housewife, Kate Manx makes poolside life pulse with a resonating sadness. Increasingly revealing eddies of ambivalent desire beneath her cautiously polite demeanor, the actress manages the tricky feat of convincing us of her lust for Allen’s rogue, that he might be the closest she gets, physically and psychologically, from escaping her gilded cage. The depth the trio of actors bring to their performances, plus nicely understated support from Robert Wark, fills the feverish chamber drama with an intense and authentic-feeling unease; a seeping malaise that not even the privileged in their elevated Los Angeles homes can keep out.