The Daily Telegraph Friday 16 August 2019 *** 25Film
Tarantino’s Hollywood elegy
is a late-career bullseye
H
alfway through Quentin
Tarantino’s Once Upon a
Time in Hollywood,
Sharon Tate goes to the
cinema to see... well,
herself. The scene is a
perfect little nested doll of looking
and playing: sitting in a half-dark
auditorium, we watch Margot Robbie
in the role of Tate, as she sits and
watches the real Tate in the role of
Freya Carlson, the gawky-sexy
sidekick in the Dean Martin spy
spoof The Wrecking Crew.
That film is mainly remembered
today as the last of Tate’s to be released
before her death aged 26, on the night
of Aug 8 1969, at the hands of the
Manson Family cult. But in this Los
Angeles movie house, on a Februaryafternoon exactly six months before
the fateful date, she’s alive twice over- both down in the stalls and the
projector’s light. As the audience
chuckles and applauds, she smiles in
flattered delight. They don’t know
she’s there to hear it, but she is.
Tarantino’s sensational ninth film is
a eulogy for Tate – but more than that,
it’s a requiem for the Hollywood that
vanished at the moment she reached
it, like a mirage in the Californian
desert. After two viewings, I think it
could be his late-career masterpiece:
uproariously funny, surging with
cinematic adrenalin and strewn with
delectable period detail, but with a
slow swell of melancholia that breaks
like a fever as its sickeningly violent
climax approaches.
Of course, Tate is a pivotal presence - but in terms of blunt screen time, she
is overshadowed by Rick Dalton and
Cliff Booth, a (fictional) fading actor
and his long-time stuntman/dogsbody,
played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad
Pitt. Rick has recently quit a successful
western TV series to take a fruitless
shot at movie stardom, and has since
fallen into a spiral of playing guest
villains on other people’s shows.
“Who’s the audience going to see
beat you up next week?” asks his agent
Marvin Schwarz (Al Pacino) about this
ignoble career turn. “The Man from
UNCLE? The Girl from UNCLE?” He
recommends a fresh start making
spaghetti westerns in Italy, and Rick is
horrified at the prospect.
In the unheroic flesh, Rick has a
stammer, a paunch, a booze problem
and fledgling crinkles of crow’s feet.
But DiCaprio invests him with the
dented magnetism and pathos of one
of Jack Nicholson’s great bittersweet
chancers – Easy Rider’s George
Hanson, or The Last Detail’s Billy
Buddusky. Pitt’s Cliff, meanwhile, is at
a perpetual loose end, running errands
and hustling for stuntman gigs that he
promptly loses through his own
cheerful irresponsibility. (In flashback,
we see him thrown off a set for starting
a fight with no less a talent than Bruce
Lee, drolly played by Mike Moh.)
DiCaprio may be this story’s lead, and
Robbie’s note-perfect Tate is
unquestionably its heart, but Pitt is its
scarred and sun-beaten soul.
Like Hal Ashby’s Shampoo, which
mixed with aimless Los Angeles
socialites on the eve of Richard Nixon’s
election, Once Upon a Time in
Hollywood is what Tarantino himself
once termed a “hang-out movie” – but
one in which the hanging-out takes
on an uneasy urgency as our
awareness grows that history is
preparing to pounce. Tarantino
regularly places his camera in
the back seat of a character’s car,
reinforcing the sense that we’re
not in control here, but being
driven to a destination of
someone else’s choosing.
All we can do is watch the
scenery whip past and
enjoy the ride.
Because at the end ofthis journey waits the Manson Family- and the blood-soaked night on
which, as Joan Didion wrote in her
essay-memoir The White Album, many
felt the Sixties came to an end. In
Tarantino’s eyes, the murderous cult
are pop-culture squatters: their base
of operations is (as in real life) a
defunct western film set. For Rick and
Cliff, these (spit the word) “hippies”
are just a subset of the generation who
are abandoning them and Hollywood
at large.
The attack itself, when it comes, is
extraordinarily hard to watch: it is
perhaps Tarantino’s most punishingly
violent scene yet, in a career hardly
short on them. But what shocked me
about it on a first encounter moved
me to tears on a second – and not just
because it throws what was lost that
night into razor-sharp relief.
Like many tales that begin Once
Upon a Time, from Snow White to
Sleeping Beauty, Tarantino’s film is
fundamentally about grief – and the
wish that gnaws at us that those we
lose could be secretly present in the
theatre one last time, to hear the
applause they earned. “We tell
ourselves stories in order to live,”
Didion wrote, describing her
struggle to make sense of that
night. That’s precisely why
Tarantino told this one, too.
Once Upon a Time
in Hollywood
18 cert, 161 min★★★★★
Dir Quentin Tarantino
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad
Pitt, Margot Robbie, Al Pacino,
Margaret Qualley, Dakota Fanning,
Austin Butler, Mike Moh, Emile
Hirsch, Bruce DernRobbie Collin
CHIEF FILM CRITICCinematic adrenalin: Brad Pitt and
Leonardo DiCaprio are note perfectPerfect: Margot
Robbie, left, as
Sharon TateANDREW COOPER/CTMG
Curious tale that dodges the big questions
T
he German director Christian
Petzold started his career with
spooky, mordant dramas about
his country’s contemporary situation,
before becoming something of an
art-house darling with 2012’s Barbara,
set in East Germany in 1980, and
2014’s Phoenix, set just after the end
of the Second World War.
His new film, Transit, is an
intriguingly unique blend of past and
present, in that it’s derived from a 1944
novel by Anna Seghers, but transposes
her whole story – involving an escape
from Nazi-occupied France – to the
Europe of today. But this isn’t quite a
Second World War story told in
modern dress. For example, we hear
no specific talk of Nazis and the effect
is, initially, disorientating. The film
centres on fugitive Georg (Franz
Rogowski) – Jewish, perhaps – who
has fled a concentration camp and
seeks every possible means to get on a
transport ship to the Americas.
The opening scenes have the
hushed atmosphere of a Forties
manhunt picture, though we are not
in the shadowy, war-torn environment
of (say) The Third Man, but in the
graffitied backstreets of modern Paris,
where Georg narrowly eludes armed
militia. He then darts by freight train
to Marseille, clutching the papers ofCasablanca meets Vertigo:
Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski
keep crossing paths in TransitTr a n s it
12A cert, 102 min★★★★★
Dir Christian Petzold
Starring Franz Rogowski, Paula
Beer, Godehard Giese, Lilien
Batman, Maryam Zaree,
Barbara AuerBy Tim RobeyO
K, so it’s no Tarantino. But there
might not be a pleasanter
surprise in cinema this year- really! – than this live-action
adaptation of Dora the Explorer, the
long-running Nickelodeon cartoon.
Sweet, exciting, silly, and featuring an
elaborate poo joke that actually earns
its keep, Dora and the Lost City of Gold
feels tailor-made for school-holiday
viewing. To that end, it also happens
to be scrupulously education-free,
unless you count a broad moral about
the value of cooperation and a
smattering of Spanish vocab.
The flesh-and-blood Dora, played by
Isabela Moner, is a full decade older
than her animated forerunner –
presumably in the hope that a teenage
face might help appease the older
siblings who come as a package with
the show’s core eight-and-under
demographic. And the film couldn’t
have hoped for a more capable lead
than 18-year-old Moner, a breakout
star in last year’s fostering comedy
Instant Family. She strikes a breezy,
guileless tone that’s funny in the same
kind of way Elmo from Sesame Street is
funny – the sheer innocent daftness of
the shtick sails past your defences,
whatever your age. This makes a great
deal of sense when you notice the film
was directed by James Bobin and
co-written by Nicholas Stoller, who
performed those same tasks on the
excellent 2011 reboot of The Muppets.
For those unversed in Dora lore, our
heroine was raised in the depths of the
jungle by her archaeologist parents
(Michael Peña, Eva Longoria), who, as
the film begins, are sending her to visit
her cousin in the city (Jeff Wahlberg),
in the hope that she might get to
experience something of an ordinary
childhood.
However, soon enough the pair are
back in the wilds of South America
with two classmates (Madeleine
Madden, Nicholas Coombe) and an old
friend of Dora’s parents (Eugenio
Derbez), on a mission to locate the lost
city of Parapata before it can be
plundered by a gang of treasure
hunters. In Dora’s books, ancient
artefacts don’t belong in a museum
but exactly where you find them: take
note, Indiana Jones.A couple of computer-generated
animal sidekicks are as wince-
inducing as you might expect, but the
generous supply of one-liners more
than compensates. I particularly
enjoyed one of the kids’ confusion on
encountering quicksand, having
previously assumed it was “just a
video game thing” – and there is a
tremendous running joke about
“jungle puzzles”, which sends up the
Hollywood convention that
civilisations of old loved nothing more
than building elaborate riddles and
contraptions into their temple walls
and floors. Dora and the Lost City of
Gold has contraptions to spare – falling
platforms, lava pits, a water slide that
pays homage to The Goonies – but its
storytelling is commendably lean and
faff-free. In the depths of summer-
break boredom, it’s a treasure hoard
of fun. RCA treasure hoard of fun
for the summer break
Breezy and
guileless: Isabela
Moner as DoraDora and the Lost City
of Gold
PG cert, 102 min★★★★★
Dir James Bobin
Starring Isabela Moner, Michael
Peña, Eva Longoria, Jeff Wahlberg,
Madeleine Madden, Nicholas Coombe,
Eugenio Derbezdead communist writer Franz Weidel,
whose identity he now assumes.
Georg falls in with other desperate
souls who crowd in consulate foyers
for all-important rubber stamps and
butt heads with the vagaries of a
hostile bureaucracy. Parallels with the
current immigration crisis could
hardly ring out more clearly, and it’s
this overlaying of history in Petzold’s
vision that impresses most.
Then again, this can’t help but
create an air of political unreality.
While it’s fair to say that Transit isn’t
aiming for modern relevance, it could
be accused of dodging some racial
questions, and some of its gambits –
including a love triangle that remixesCasablanca with sepulchral dabs of
Vertigo – dampen its dramatic charge.
Georg realises that the late Weidel’s
wife, Marie (Paula Beer), is searching
for her husband – the two keep
crossing paths – and that, visa-less, she
has fallen in with a doctor called
Richard (Godehard Giese) who’s
itching to get on the boat. Since Georg
is the one in possession of Weidel’s
papers and also Marie’s, he’s in a
position to help the two of them, but
also seems to be falling for her.
The excellent Rogowski is expected
to carry the whole show with his
haunted bearing and air of doubt, but
Beer frustrates, as a skittish mystery
woman forever darting past Georg on
the street. Petzold develops this
character far too late for us to get a
serious hold on her, and the effect is
damaging: it begins to feel as though
Georg’s political status can’t be all that
troublesome if he’s able to hook his
future on the whims of a flimsy affair.
Yet there’s still value to Petzold’s
ideas, and he’s capable of inspiration
like few others. A scene with Georg
fixing a radio while his neighbour’s
young son looks on, becomes a sacred
hymn to Georg’s mother’s memory,
when a station crackles to life
featuring a song she once taught
him. Tenderly played by Rogowski,
this grabs your concentration
rather more fully than the pseudo-
urgent business of who’s sailing
where and when.
With respect to Seghers, perhaps
this other makeshift family – with
Maryam Zaree as the film’s second
widow, mother to the boy – was the
one to double down on, instead of
dabbling with the unconvincing Marie.
Georg is left in a kind of purgatory, but
is it a worthwhile kind? He seems
stranded less by tragic choice than by
default, as the only character of
substance left on an entire continent.ut movie” – but
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