Review of Quentin Tarantino’s memoirs “Film Speculations”

The Individuum publishing house is publishing Quentin Tarantino’s book “Film Speculations,” the genre of which cannot be precisely defined. Part moving memoir, part brilliant film criticism, part helpless rambling with name-dropping in the spirit of some cinephile blogger. Mikhail Trofimenkov She not only captivated me with the author’s complete disregard for the stylistic unity of the text and admirable anti-political correctness: the critic sensed a brotherly soul in the director.

As a child, Quentin Tarantino burst into tears while watching the Disney cartoon “Bambi” and could not watch it to the end: the cruelty of the death of the fawn’s mother and the subsequent forest fire was too unbearable. Damn it, the same thing happened to me at a screening of “Bambi” at the Leningrad Gosfilmofond cinema in the S. M. Kirov House of Culture.

And it’s not that Tarantino and I were such pink ponies. By that time, he had already watched (at the age of seven) John Avildsen’s film “Joe,” which shocked even seasoned film critics, about parents shooting their hippie children. And he adored not only Don Siegel’s “Dirty Harry,” but also John Boorman’s “Deliverance” with its monstrous homosexual rape scene. And I already fell in love with Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai,” and Damiano Damiani’s “The Golden Bullet,” and even Coppola’s “Apocalypse,” which I saw in a double screening—oh, how baby Tarantino loved double screenings—of MIFF films.

It’s funny, however, that Tarantino grew up exclusively on Hollywood: he learned European cinema later. And we, Soviet cinephiles of the 1970s, despite the Iron Curtain, grew up watching European, not Soviet cinema.

Yes, we both went to the movies from an early age, in Soviet terms, “children under 16.” Thanks first to the connivance of familiar ushers, then to acceleration: these big guys grew big. And both felt the difference between the human cruelty of Siegel or Kurosawa and the slobbering speculativeness of Disney. And both felt, while watching non-children’s films, that they were involved in “adult time,” as Tarantino accurately formulates.

Memories of the first cinematic sensations are the best in the book. More precisely, about those who accompanied Tarantino-baby to the cinema. And these were the boyfriends of his young, beautiful and carefree mother and her friends. They met exclusively with black guys: Quentin composed hymns for two of them, a certain Reggie and Floyd. And Floyd’s assessments of the films they once saw—there are plenty of reasons to suspect that Tarantino attributed his own aphorisms to the ghostly Floyd, but who will catch the author’s hand—equated the assessments of the high-status Hollywood film critic Kevin Thomas, to whom a separate chapter of “Film Speculations” is dedicated.

Floyd was also the author of the endless Western script about a black cowboy, which remained unknown to the world. Who knows, if it weren’t for Floyd’s fascinating demonstrations of the twists and turns of this script, Tarantino would not have made Django Unchained. But for sure, if Quentin had not gone with his older friends to black cinemas, he would not have discovered the great blaxploitation actress Pam Grier, who played the main role in his Jackie Brown.

Childhood experience seems to serve as an unconditional certificate of Tarantino’s political correctness. However, he doesn’t care about any correctness. It’s good that in essays about his favorite films he praises the “bold reactionary” nature of “Dirty Harry,” which for the first time brought to the screen the “new evil” of serial murder and is forgivable even in its homophobia. And also the “beauty” of the brutal carnage in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, the “sadomasochistic rapture” of Deliverance, the “sexuality of violence” of Pedro Almodóvar and the “intoxicating cruelty” of the “bloody catharsis” of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.

Little of. He, of course, while declaring the great John Ford a notorious racist, adores his western “The Searchers” to such an extent that he sees in it a matrix of such different, different films as “Taxi Driver,” John Flynn’s “Roll of Thunder” and Paul Schrader’s “Hardcore.” Sorry, Quentin, this is just some kind of unhealthy fixation on the epic about the journey of two Civil War veterans in search of a girl kidnapped by Indians. However, Tarantino can do anything.

Even to argue that Harvey Keitel’s performance, albeit brilliant, of the role of the pimp Dapper in “Taxi Driver” is initially false. There were no white pimps, Tarantino claims, in New York – and who, if not him, should know about it. Well, it wasn’t, that’s all. And in the original script, the Taxi Driver shot exactly a gang of African Americans. But, Quentin winks at the readers, who could do this role better than Keitel? That’s it: the struggle between ethics and aesthetics (as well as the rejection of any censorship) is the subtext of Tarantino’s seemingly hooligan escapades. And he himself does not unconditionally accept either side in this struggle.

This is precisely what the best film essay of “Cinema Speculations” is about, dedicated to the deep split within what we usually perceive as a single “New Hollywood” of the late 1960s and early 1970s. According to Tarantino (and he is certainly right), that brilliant generation of directors split into “film punks” (John Cassavetes, Arthur Penn, Hal Ashby, Richard Rush and others) and “anti-system people” (Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas, Spielberg and others). The first dismantled the genre, crushed the American dream, and demythologized “American fascism.” The latter revived the Hollywood genre along with the American dream, knowing full well that, as Tarantino says, a lot of people want to watch “films about giant ants.”

Which one was right? Both, and above all fans of films about giant ants. And even more right is the clever Tarantino, who with his confused speech pressed to the heart both those and others, and still others, and even giant ants.