Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1159832
12 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 25 AUGUST 2019 FILM FILM THE accusation of self-indul- gence is a funny thing, when applied to art. Sure, we know what people mean when they fling it: art that is aggressive- ly, navel-gazingly self-refer- ential, to the point of distanc- ing the viewer away from it by dint of being so masturba- tory that the only one having fun is clearly just the creator themselves. It tends to be a label that sticks to non-main- stream film-makers in par- ticular – Danish provocateur Lars Von Trier gets lumped with it quite often – though whether or not another serial offender, Quentin Tarantino, still counts among the num- ber of indie wunderkinds scratching a living from off on the fringes is a debatable point. Certainly, Tarantino has risen from the depths of the early 90s indie Hollywood re- naissance – propped up in no small part by the trail-blazing successes of revisionist crime capers Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994) – to establish himself as a box of- fice smashing auteur who can now paint big, and with the expensive supplies of the pe- riod piece too. Post the epic kung-fu duol- ogy that was Kill Bill Vols. I and II (2003 and 2004, respec- tively), Tarantino has decided to play God in an additional way to the implicit, already- expected perks afforded to a writer-director of any stripe. Inglourious Basterds (2009) allowed him to rewrite histo- ry and kill Hitler, and Django Unchained (2012) gifted the history of American slavery with an avenging angel. Now, Tarantino turns his lens – or rather, lensman: the award-winning and supreme- ly on-form cinematographer Robert Richardson – to the last days of the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, where the spirit of 1969 was just about ready to swoop in and transform this factory of largely toothless entertain- ment into the kind of raw and gritty cinema that would col- our Tarantino's early output. I won't spoil exactly how Tarantino applies his histori- cal revisionism in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, as this is largely what characterises the build-up of pleasurable suspense in the film's final act. Even the viewers who are only vaguely knowledge- able about what happened to actress Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) and her friends on that fateful night in Febru- ary, 1969 on her and director Roman Polanski's property in Cielo Drive, will be asking themselves: how is Tarantino going to spin this? Luckily for both the audi- ence and myself right now, Tarantino treats Sharon Ta- te's storyline as an animated framing device – it's barely even a sub-plot – and instead focuses our attention on the dwindling fortunes of Rick Dalton (Leonardo Di Caprio), a TV and occasional feature film actor who is, by his own admission, already on his way to becoming a "has been". Perhaps the only thing stop- ping him from sliding into to- tal depression is the fact that his go-to stuntman, the stoic war hero Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) is now also his de facto 'gopher', seeing to Rick's dai- ly affairs and keeping his mo- rale up to manageable levels, For his supposedly penultimate feature, Quentin Tarantino delivers a surprisingly chilled out and cheekily pleasant immersion into the twilight years of Hollywood's Golden Age Teodor Reljic Shake on it: Brad Pitt (left), Leonardo Di Caprio and Al Pacino in Quentin Tarantino's ninth film and supposedly penultimate film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Pure indulgence at its best