PULP FICTION

PULP FICTION (Directed by Quentin Tarantino. Starring John Travolta, Bruce Willis, Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson, Harvey Keitel)

I could go on with the cast list. Pulp Fiction has one of those Robert Altman style ensembles, boasting more Hollywood talent than the average AIDS awareness fund raiser. Christopher Walken, Tim Roth, Amanda Plummer, Eric Stoltz, Rosanna Arquette and Maria De Maderios all lend support, while Steve Buscemi shows up to deliver a few throwaway lines as a Buddy Holly lookalike waiter and comedian and up-and-coming actor Alexis Arquette appears in the unenviable part of a man encased from head to toe in a rubber suit, with little to do and no lines at all, hardly a showcase for his undoubted abilities. But just like those fund raisers, the important thing is being there.

All this talent in a movie made for $8 million – less than Bruce Willis’ usual fee – is a testament to the pulling power of Quentin Tarantino, writer, director, actor and the film world’s newest wunderkind. Tarantino exploded onto the scene with his debut Reservoir Dogs, an astonishingly intense, acerbically amusing, physically and emotionally violent heist movie that hit film audiences like an overdue wake up call. Two even more violent, more blackly humorous and trashily pop scripts (Tony Scott’s True Romance and Oliver Stone’s forthcoming Natural Born Killers) have enhanced his reputation, and his directorial follow up Pulp Fiction arrives already garlanded with honours, having scooped this year’s Best Film Award at Cannes, probably the first time the French film festival has handed over the award to a movie that features graphic butt-fucking, major blood-letting, a discussion of the sexual benefits to be gained from body piercing and quite possibly the most frequent repetition of the word nigger outside of a National Front meeting.

The title immediately lets you know the score. This is indeed a world of pulp, lurid and trashy tales set in an imaginary landscape of gangsters, molls, hits and scams. As a generous, value-for-money offer, Tarantino delivers three interlinking short stories, with overlapping characters and a non-linear narrative, taking familiar chest-nuts and twisting them when least expected. There is the tale of hit-man Vincent Vega (the imaginatively cast John Travolta) reluctantly taking his boss’s beautiful wife (Uma Thurman) on a date in which he knows that he can look but not touch; ageing boxer Butch (a well used Bruce Willis) reneging on a promise to the mob to throw a fight; and the adventures of a couple of hit men (Travolta and the imposing Samuel L. Jackson) whose day goes spectacularly wrong.

These are B-movie plots given the A-list treatment, but there is more to them than mere thrills, spills and twists in the tale. Tarantino’s characters are all vividly eloquent, delivering reams of bright and amusing dialogue and behaving like genuine, unpredictable, real people in a fictional world. And Tarantino exploits his three narratives for as many shifts of emphasis and pace as he can manage, lulling you into a sense of security before he hits you with a whammy or, as he did during the Reservoir Dogs torture scene, piling up the excruciating tension until you can hardly bear to watch the screen. And yup, he has come up with a scene to match the ear severing for sheer can’t-tear-your-eyes-away intensity, compelling (when I saw it) an entire cinema full of hardened media hacks to squirm in their underpants. Big Breakfast man Chris Evans was seated in front of me for most of the film, but during the aforementioned moment he actually sank so low in his seat he disappeared from view.

Which is not to suggest that Pulp Fiction is an excessively violent film. Excessive yes. Violent, well sort of. Much of the criticism of Reservoir Dogs centred on the perceived violence, but Tarantino is actually the kind of film-maker who shows less, but makes you feel more. When a shot is fired, you don’t see the exploding head but you reel from the splatter of blood. Juxtaposing the violence with black humour, he makes what passes by thoughtlessly in most films, genuinely unsettling. And more often than not, startlingly amusing.

On his first properly budgeted picture, Tarantino is like a kid let loose in a toy shop, or more specifically, a movie buff let loose on a film set. Framed within a handsome widescreen format, he plays with his tracking shots and sudden edits, fiddles with the colour (a cab ride is shot against a black and white backdrop), adds animation (watch out for Uma’s square) and once again overloads the soundtrack with invigoratingly classic cuts. It abounds with movie references, from in-jokes to homages and blatant steals (the suitcase with the glowing contents from Kiss Me Deadly by way of Repo Man is employed as a Hitchcockian McGuffin) but breezes so confidently past them it rarely seems over clever. And Tarantino demonstrates once again that he is a real actor’s director, pulling universally interesting performances from his superb cast. The result is a smart, hip, funny, entertaining, motherfucker of a movie. Imagine Short Cuts if it had been based on the stories of Elmore Leonard instead of Raymond Carver and you should get the picture.

Another powerhouse movie, then. Yet despite Tarantino’s conspicuous success and clearly abundant talent, it is hard to tell if he will live up to the hype that hails him as heir to Martin Scorsese, and not instead settle down to be a kind of over-heated Hal Hartley. As much as the film further defines the director’s style, it seems to expose his limitations. It takes place in the same trash universe as all his scripts, a world several removes from the one we live in, and while all his characters might have a lot to say, it is hard to figure out if Tarantino himself does. Reservoir Dogs gained genuine resonance from its intensely moral core, its study of loyalty and betrayal, and Pulp Fiction seems a mere entertainment in comparison, almost a ride movie. Still, you would be well advised to strap yourself into your seat, for this is a ride through the extremely bumpy terrain of Tarantino’s inventively sick mind, the kind of journey that could turn even the most hardened traveller to pulp.