Once upon a time... Quentin Tarantino

Cinema Wednesdays - Jonas Follonier

The ninth film by American director Quentin Tarantino—which almost makes one think of his tenth, as-yet-unreleased film, which is said to be his last—stands out as a true masterpiece. Packed with references to cinema, the highly anticipated Once upon a time... in Hollywood is the perfect Tarantino fable.

Hollywood, 1969. The golden age of Hollywood cinema is over, and actor Rick Dalton (played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who is excellent as usual) finds himself has been. His stand-in, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt, who’s also excellent—for a change), follows him everywhere to drive him around and assist him, in addition to performing his stunts on set—which are becoming fewer and fewer. In the city, celebrities’ cars drive fast, and movies are everywhere. The fucking hippies, as Rick (or Tarantino?) puts it, are on display one last time amid a general sense of carefree abandon—a mood that will be shattered by a tragedy unfolding on the night of August 8–9, 1969. Everything in the film foreshadows this night, which, along with February 9, 1969—the day on which the first part takes place—constitutes the film’s second key date.

In reality, it was Roman Polanski’s wife at the time, Sharon Tate, who was stabbed to death by Charles Manson’s Satanist hippie cult. In the film, Quentin Tarantino reimagines the story, just as he had done previously in his work. All in all, this ending—which we won’t reveal any further—isn’t all that significant, except that it draws our attention to the fact that’Once upon a time... in Hollywood, as its title suggests, is first and foremost a fable. It is not about reconstructing real events, but about creating a personal work based on a specific context—the end of Hollywood’s golden age. With a soundtrack sixties we're nostalgic for.

Nostalgia for a time he never knew

All the critics have said it: this ninth Tarantino film is unique in that it’s nostalgic and more serious than his previous ones—some have even called it more mature. True, but what makes it all the more interesting is that this nostalgia is the most artistic kind there is: nostalgia for an era the director never experienced. In 1969, Tarantino was six years old; he didn’t experience that Hollywood era firsthand. And that is the hallmark of the most magnificent men of our time—the most touching and vulnerable ones: those who long for a time that wasn’t their own, and who may never have even existed!

For indeed, the nostalgia also present in the characters played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt is, in turn, open to this question: Did the golden age of the American Western—which they long for—ever actually exist? And this entire line of thought—which is by no means abstract in Tarantino’s work, but is made concrete by the setting and the prosaic nature of the dialogue—reaches its full depth when we consider that the Western genre itself is based on a myth. The cowboy never existed as such, and yet we miss him. If there is nostalgia, then it is more like melancholy. There is something inexplicable and irresistibly Western about it. It is complemented by a nostalgia for childhood, where dreams are as real as reality. All of this shines through the screen.

A cinema about cinema

And there's so much more to say about the film's various themes. As we've already suggested, Once upon a time... in Hollywood It focuses on the end of the American Western and the rise of the Spaghetti Western. In addition to the various scenes of fake flashbacks contained in the film, its title conveniently echoes Sergio Leone's two most personal and prodigious films: Once Upon a Time in the West - released in the United States... in 1969! - and Once upon a time in America. Also—and I firmly believe this—this penultimate (or final?) film by Quentin Tarantino, which is highly personal, is really about Tarantino himself. One of the characters states that cinematic geniuses come along once every fifty or one hundred years. Our director no doubt hopes—and he has every reason to—that one day the collective memory will remember him as one of them. And then it will be able to say, nostalgically: Once upon a time, there was Quentin Tarantino.

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Photo credit: © Sony Pictures