LONDON CITY NIGHTS: western

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

'The Hateful Eight' (2015) directed by Quentin Tarantino

Tuesday, January 12, 2016 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

The Hateful Eight is a stubborn, difficult and unwieldy beast. It's three hours long. It mostly takes place in a single room. It's composed of wilfully long conversations between unlikeable men. Scenes are studded with uncomfortably casual violence against women. The word "nigger" peppers most scenes. Even the 70mm celluloid itself sounds like a pain in the arse - weighing in at a hefty 250lb and a couple of kilometers long.

But, make no bones about it, this movie is fucking grrrrrrreat.

The setup is so straightforward that it could be ripped from any cheapo thriller. Bounty hunter John "the Hangman" Ruth (Kurt Russell) is bringing in murderer Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Her trip to the gallows is delayed by a blizzard, stranding the characters in an isolated roadhouse, Minnie's Haberdashery.

The single room building traps a genuinely hateful crew of scum, liars and and sadists in close proximity. Each comes stacked with ulterior motives, dark secrets and murderous intent - and each is armed to the teeth. By the time the credits roll the wooden planks of Minnie's will run red with blood, brain matter, liquefied internal organs and puke.

This is easily Tarantino's most nihilistic work to date; a forensic investigation into American history and folklore that concludes with a diagnosis of incurable systematic rot. With its skeletal narrative and broad archetypes, the film begs us to view it as parable. with Minnie's Haberdashery a miniature United States of America. Now, this isn't a remotely subtle metaphor - Tarantino goes so far as to have his characters divide the room I Love Lucy-style between Union North and Confederate South: "The fireplace will be Georgia and the bar is Philadelphia."

Within this snowglobe are men that who've stepped straight out of the American subconscious. Swaddled in thick animal skins and glaring out from under impressive facial hair, they jockey each other for dominance as they playact a warped ideal of justice.

The omnipresent threat of violence acts as a catalyst for the most volatile fractures in the American psyche: endemic racism, capital punishment, fear and hatred of women, historical divisions and gun control. Tarantino rubs salt into these wounds, laying out his portrait of an society with its foundations sunk deep in blood.

That Tarantino would eventually go full political isn't such a big surprise. Both Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained explored the idea of liberation through revolutionary violence, the films a fantasy of granting victimised minorities ultimate power over those that tormented them. His support of the Black Lives Matter movement and subsequent public feud with the police union (who ominously promise a nasty "surprise" for Tarantino) underlines his recent commitment to overt political statements.

Yet where Django and Basterds find catharsis through violence, The Hateful Eight finds only ugliness. Perhaps the noblest man in the room is Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a Union war hero turned bounty hunter. Tarantino's dialogue is a perfect match for Jackson's precise cadence, so every line from his mouth is a joy to hear. Yet, his big triumphant moment is a sadistically delivered, extremely graphic description of him raping a man, and much of his desire later in the film is to "kill that bitch".

It creates an awkward disconnect between expectations and reality. We want Major Warren to fill out the shoes of the hero, to be a shining light in this mire of bigotry and racism. Yet he quickly proves almost as despicable as everyone else; for example, he doesn't so much as push back against racism as divert it for his own ends.

By the final scenes we're witnessing a calculated and ritualistic murder. The female victim looks like some totemic death goddess: framed to give her demonic wings, entirely covered in blood, gnashing jagged teeth and festooned with the limbs of her enemies. The black freedom fighter and virulent racist cop are pressed together in an homoerotic lynching, their faces contorted in orgasmic bliss. It's one hell of a weird image: decades of racial hatred forgotten in the name of unity against women.

Just as we think we've plumbed the depths, we're presented with an unexpected ray of light. Major Warren has been carrying around a letter from Abraham Lincoln, used as a prop to disarm white Unionists he encounters. As they bleed out, the men reverently recite it, finding consolation in his sage words. Complicating this is that both men know the letter is fake. As we close out to a Roy Orbison track, Tarantino leaves us to ponder whether a comforting lie is preferable to the truth: just because you know something doesn't exist doesn't mean you can't find inspiration in it. In this, perhaps, we see what he's trying to accomplish with his films.

The Hateful Eight is a complex and mature piece of writing - a riposte to those who accuse Tarantino of being all style and no substance. It almost goes without saying that it's downright beautiful too, from the wide landscapes (beautiful in 70mm) to the careful editing, outstanding Ennio Morricone score and lovingly curated gore effects.

That Tarantino has carte blanche to do whatever the hell he wants proves that this is not the worst of all possible worlds. A stunning achievement.

★★★★★

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

'Slow West' (2015) directed by John MacLean

Wednesday, June 24, 2015 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

The psychedelic Western ranks highly in my obscure film genre top ten. In these rare films, agoraphobia inducing scenery stands for the spiritual infinite, and combined with antisocial (usually bearded) men-on-the-edge, usually makes for enjoyably bonkers cinema. Jodorowsky's inestimably grand El Topo is king of the genre and bubbling under are its buddies Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, the recent Jauja and Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man (to name but a few). Slow West can stand proudly alongside them.

The directorial debut of former Beta Band member John MacLean, Slow West is a classic hero's quest. The teenage Jay (Kodi Smith-McPhee) is travelling through the 1870s American wilderness in search of his lost love, Rose (Caren Pistorius). It's his fault that she and her father had to escape from their native Scotland, but with a romantic heart and charming naivety he's braving mile after dangerous mile to track her down.

Unbeknownst to him he's not alone in his pursuit. Both Rose and her father's faces peer from wanted posters across the west, attracting the attention of a gaggle of disreputable bounty hunters. Prime among them is Silas (Michael Fassbender), a rough and tumble Han-Solo-a-like who figures Jay's is his best bet to find them. So he befriends the young Scot, gives him advice on life beneath the stars and guides/follows him towards their mutual goal - never letting on that while Jay is seeking love, Silas is seeking blood.

This sets the stage for a picaresque road western in which the unlikely pair encounter weird characters, along with generous doses of peril, intrigue and danger. By way of an example; our naifish hero meets a trio of Congolese musicians in the middle of nowhere and they exchange philosophical pleasantries on love and life in perfect French, or befriends a suspiciously Werner Herzoggy Bavarian ethnographer, or has a tense confrontation with Native Americans that unexpectedly devolves into slapstick. It might sound a bit twee on paper, but the intention is to contrast mannered symbolism with grubby realpolitik.

Perhaps the closest thematic companion is the above mentioned Dead Man. There, Johnny Depp's innocent 'William Blake' wandered aimlessly through a monochrome landscape, encountering cowboys played by the likes of Iggy Pop, Crispin Glover and Billy Bob Thornton. But where Dead Man shows us how the environment causes the slow disintegration of its heroes psyche, Slow West shows a more submissive landscape. This is, after all, entirely appropriate - we did indeed tame the Wild West - mystical forests "from which no man returns" now strip malls and McDonalds.

This is conveyed in long, intoxicatingly beautiful shots. McLean increasingly emphasises the blue of the sky and the fluffiness of the clouds against dull earth tones, with the contrast increasing the more we progress through the film. The zenith is a goddamn beautiful shoot out set in and around a house in the middle of a corn field. The house is new, white wood, the sky is blue, the corn is a lush yellow - all spattered by gobs of thick crimson blood.

There's time enough for the small things too. Use of tilt shift focus contributes to a hallucinatory effect, often combined with surreal imagery. In the most memorable shots, our hero examines an apparently gigantic mushroom, and later we slowly zoom in on ants swarming around the barrel of a lost revolver (apparently quoting the opening sequence of Lynch's Blue Velvet).

Upon all that sits two marvellous performances by Smit-McPhee and Fassbender. Though each individually impresses, it's when they bounce off one another that they really shine. These interactions are filled with nuance; secret smiles when Jay devises a solution to a problem that impresses Silas; or the myriad ways in which the actors convey their growing trust in one another. Also, and it somewhat goes without saying, but Fassbender looks cool as hell as a cowboy, obviously relishing playing a windbitten, rough-edged outlaw.

The title doesn't lie. Slow West in no particular hurry to get to its conclusion, happy to settle for being gently lyrical rather than propulsive. Though not without the occasional hard edge, it stands out as a curiously optimistic Western, one in which (for once) kindness stands a chance of triumphing over bloody amorality. An excellent directorial debut.

★★★★

Slow West is on general release from 26 June.

Thursday, February 7, 2013

‘Django Unchained’ (2012) directed by Quentin Tarantino, 4th February 2013

Thursday, February 7, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 1 Comment

‘Django Unchained’ is a fantastic film that should be seen by anyone with the remotest interest in cinema. It's a patchwork of cinematic references and musical cues swiped from other films, but though he may cast his net far and wide for inspiration, the true genius of Tarantino is the way he synthesises a hundred disparate elements into a seamless package. Every character in the film is a work of genius, every performance sharpened to a razor edge. ‘Django Unchained’ radiates confidence from every frame. If you haven’t seen it, go and see it.

This film has been out for a while, so I’m going to be free and easy with spoilers for the plot. If you haven’t seen the film, stop here, watch it and then come back.

Tarantino gets a lot of stick for obsessing over surface ‘cool’. Films like ‘Pulp Fiction’ and both ‘Kill Bills’ are criticised as being examples of style over substance. Sure, the dialogue may be sparkling, the direction utterly entertaining and every single piece of casting might be perfect, but, these monsters of cinema say, where is the heart? Why is style over substance such a bad thing anyway? Given the choice between a film with big dollops of visual and verbal panache and something drearily important boringly eking its way to a moralistic conclusion I’ll take the thrill ride nine of ten times. Cinema is an audiovisual medium, and as far as I’m concerned it’s perfectly valid to enjoy a film that's gunning for my reptile brain as much as one that wants to massage my frontal lobe.

But, I hear you say, why not have both style and substance? You’re right, but both here and in ‘Inglourious Basterds’ that’s exactly what Tarantino is doing. The climax of ‘Basterds’ has a cinema full of Nazis thoroughly enjoying seeing one of their own gunning down Allied troops, a twisted reflection of the thrill that we’re getting from seeing Brad Pitt carving swastikas into Nazi’s foreheads. ‘Django Unchained’ uses violence in a similarly intelligent way, arguing that the only honest way to view true horror and brutality of slavery is through a fountain of blood.

King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) and Django (Jaime Foxx)

The film pointedly introduces itself as taking place “2 years before the Civil War”. Right now this makes the film a sibling to Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln’. While ‘Lincoln’ is about the importance of co-operation and diplomacy in trying to put a broken country back together, the violence of ‘Django Unchained’ demonstrates to us exactly why it was necessary to break the country in the first place.

‘Django Unchained’ sets out its stall when we see Django hesitating over shooting a wanted man ploughing a field with his son. Schultz explains what he’s done to deserve getting shot, then tells Django to “quit your pussyfootin’ and shoot him.” This is the moment where Tarantino properly shows his cards. Slavery is so abhorrent, so intrinsically violent, corruptive and venal that approaching the issue in a tasteful and restrained way is disingenuous. So when Tarantino applies grindhouse cinematic techniques he’s not trivialising slavery, he’s using cinematic language to explain to a switched on, culturally literate audience exactly how barbaric it was. The idealism and dealmaking of ‘Lincoln’ will have to come later. Blood needs to be spilled as an overture to the Civil War to come. Bluntly and honestly, these slaving motherfuckers need to die.

The avenging angel meting out this violence is Django, who Tarantino takes pains to depict as a self made man. His development over the course of the film from hunched, monosyllabic slave to invincible gunman is perfect, we see a man consciously creating his own mythology, transforming himself from man to legend. This identity - the super-cool slave bent on revenge against those who’ve wronged him is constructed within the narrative by Django and his partner, King Schultz, and by Tarantino as writer/director of the film.

Tarantino is nothing if not self-aware, realising that a story about a white man liberating a black slave and ‘civilising’ him would raise some eyebrows. Fortunately, Schultz avoids these pitfalls by allowing Django free rein to construct his own identity. Within the film Django gets to choose his own outfits and to try on different roles as he and Schultz concoct plans to collect bounties. While Schultz impresses roles upon Django (the servant, the black slaver etc) these function as a space for our protagonist to concoct an identity of his own. But these are still restrictions or chains placed on Django by another, and for these reasons it’s necessary that the film kill off Schultz before the final act.

It’s only in the final act of the film that Django is truly unchained. Throughout the majority of the film, Schultz has constructed sets of fertile fictions within which he can decide who he is and what he wants. Before the last act, these fictions are swept away. Django is once more in chains, naked, sent back to square one. But things have changed, Django cunningly talks his way out of his bondage, displaying an wit we haven't seen him have a chance to display. As Django rides a white horse through the plantation fields, rifle raised in the air he realises his identity as an iconic force of nature, an avatar of the righteous fury of the black diaspora. He effortlessly toys with his tormentors, passing violent judgment upon them. It’s interesting to note that in this process, Django even kabooms the white man that’s been extratextually ordering him about, Tarantino himself.

As interesting as Django is, the character is necessarily slightly restricted by having him to so perfectly embody heroic vengeance. The other two characters of note are Calvin Candie, the owner of the horrific ‘Candieland’ plantation and King Schultz, Django’s mentor. Both men represent different aspects of civilisation, Schultz embodying an outsider’s European idealism and Candie representing a hypocritical ‘Southern hospitality'. For all their differences, both utilise the mechanics of slavery to get what they want out of life. Schultz may deplore cruelty, but is still sure to get a legal bill of sale when he ‘buys’ Django and later Broomhilda.

Much has been made of the seemingly random, reckless decision of Schultz to shoot Candie through the heart rather than shake his hand. It’s a surprise twist, the man who has epitomised patience and logic blows away the owner of a plantation in front of his entire staff. On reflection its not so random after all, for the first half of the film Schultz is to some degree insulated from the true horror of slavery. He’s unfailingly polite to slave owners, using his verbal dexterity to talk them round. It’s only when he dons the disguise of pretending to be interesting in ‘Mandingo’ fighting in Mississippi that his demeanour begins to change. Firstly we see him visibly disgusted at the fight to the death in Candie’s ‘Cleopatra Club’ and then almost brought to breaking point on witnessing a slave being torn apart by dogs at Candie’s command. So, when his ruse has been rumbled and the tables have been turned he ends up looking into a mirror, seeing a confident, fancily dressed man with European affectations offering his hand. Shaking it would seal his complicity with Candie’s barbarism. He’s reached the point where he’s disgusted by his own twisted reflection and “can’t resist” blowing him away.

It's also interesting that Schultz is a sly inversion of the ‘magical negro’ archetype. If you haven’t come across the term before, it refers to a cliche in American fiction to have a wise, generally old black character whose sage advice and innate spirituality are used to help the white protagonist in their struggle. Schultz turns this upside down, acting as the ‘magical’ German to Django. Brilliantly, even there’s a scene where, sitting around a campfire, Schultz tells Django ‘a story of his people’; the story of Siegfried’s rescue of Brunhilde.

Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio)

Calvin Candie is a great villain, his sliminess and stupidity putting paid to the repellent myth of Southern hospitality. Generosity and kindness across the scarred backs of slaves is a thin veneer of civilisation on top of sheer barbarism. It’s important to understand that Candie isn’t naïve, in the “three dimples” speech he wonders why the slaves don’t just rise up and kill his family, prooof that he knows the immorality of slavery. All of this adds up to a subtle but powerful argument against Southern slave-owners having any moral justification for their actions; even the defence of ignorance is exposed as lacking.

Fascinatingly, Tarantino even has time to force us to identify with him. There is a lot of violence in Tarantino's films, but few scenes as viscerally unpleasant as the Mandingo fight we watch Candie enjoy. We instinctively condemn Candie's gladiatorial bloodlust, but the camera positions us behind the sofa with him, identifying us with the audience watching the fight rather than with the fighters themselves, rarely showing their faces. This goes a long way to defusing the argument that he's exploiting slavery for entertainment value. Throughout 'Django Unchained' we are sitting in comfy cinema chairs watching black slaves tear each other apart for our entertainment as we munch popcorn and sip soft drinks. We can learn from what Tarantino is showing us, but this scene urges us to recognise the problems with being entertained by it.

Stephen (Samuel L Jackson) and Broomhilda (Kerry Washington)

Possibly the most complex character to unpick is Stephen, Candie’s “house nigger”. He’s a tightly wound ball of self-loathing and rage, a man who’s worked to get to the highest position of authority he can within a corrupt system. While Stephen is vile in his obsequiousness and cunning, we know deep down that he’s consciously taken on this role to survive and prosper as best he can in a system designed to grind him underfoot. Both he and Django have gained freedom and privileges, yet Stephen exists within the system of oppression and Django outside. It's difficult to put yourself within Stephen’s shoes, but on a certain level his anger and disgust when he sees Django sitting at his master’s table is understandable. If a black man is allowed to behave as if he is white, it's a clear threat to the power that Stephen has clawed for himself.

Ultimately, even though we may feel sympathy for Stephen it’s fleeting. When we see Django tormenting him in the film’s finale he's utterly justified. An interesting thread in Tarantino’s recent work is the moral judgment he makes on those that aid and abet oppression and evil as opposed to those that front it. While Candie gets off relatively lightly with a single shot to the heart, Stephen gets shot in both kneecaps and left watching a dynamite fuse slowly burn down. A similar scenario happens with the Brittle brothers in the first half of the film, the man who does the whipping of slaves is summarily executed, while the man who ties up the slaves and salaciously watches gets viciously whipped by Django before being shot repeatedly. Tarantino reserves a large portion of his disgust for people that aid evil while trying to avoid taking any responsibility for it. I can see echoes of this in the final scenes of ‘Inglourious Basterds’, with the solidly bourgeois men and women in the cinema getting mown down with as much righteousness as a platoon of uniformed SS officers.

Perhaps the funniest example is Django’s carefree execution of Lara Candie, the widowed sister of Calvin. Although she never commits any overt evil during the film, it’s people like her who are willing to smile politely and ignore inhumanity without raising objections that allow systems like slavery to perpetuate themselves. When Django shoots her, she’s hilariously yanked off stage at an almost 90 degree angle, her death comical and at the same time utterly justified no matter how ‘nice’ she may be.

By the time Django turns to us, smiling as the wreckage of the Candie plantation burns behind him we feel a powerful catharsis. Tarantino and Django have carved their way through slavery with gusto, creating a new mythology in their wakes. The grindhouse and blaxploitation films that Tarantino pillages are part of the bedrock of our shared cultural experience, the style that he's criticised for is the substance his critics are seeking. By using these familiar techniques and archetypes Tarantino has created a pop mythology of retribution, he's taken modern culture, fashioned a missile out of it and fired it into the past. Everything from the whip-pans to the 2pac song on the soundtrack makes the past pop with life and relevance, highlighting the evil of 1858 through the prism of 2013.

That's why Tarantino is one of the few film-makers that successfully marries style and substance. He's a creature of cinema, unashamedly standing on the shoulders of greats, forging new meaning out of the universal cultural experience. That's why as far as I'm concerned 'Django Unchained' is a Great Film.

*****/*****

LONDON CITY NIGHTS