'Hollywood on Holiday', or 'Conversation as a Foreign Concept'

What fascinates me most about Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is not the faultless Sergio Leone homage with which it opens, nor the riotous and Bowie-driven bonfire with which it reaches its climax, nor even the reasoning behind the introduction of a character as incredibly interesting as Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz only to do next to nothing with him. It is, as with a lot of Tarantino’s best work, the conversations.

Consider, if you will, Pulp Fiction, minus the sublime exchange between Vincent and Mia interrogating the nature of the small-talk in which they are engaged. Showy and self-conscious, sure…but central to the reasons why the film works the way it does.

Also, if you’ve seen it, think about Jackie Brown, and then take away the discussion that Jackie holds with her bail bondsman, Max Cherry, the morning that he comes around to collect his gun. Not only would the film’s plot no longer make full sense, but we wouldn’t understand either character as much as we need to. Neither, perhaps, would we care about them.

How about the conversation about Sonny Chiba martial arts films, and Elvis Presley, which opens True Romance? If it wasn’t there, would you miss it?

The film would.

Ditto for the coffee-table discussion of Madonna in Reservoir Dogs.

However, there is one particular conversation in Inglourious Basterds which is even more unmissable. It is the one which forms the basis of the film’s fourth chapter, ‘Operation Kino’, and takes places within La Louisiane tavern. To suggest it is a tour de force is to perhaps affix the most appropriate cliché there can be for such a conversation, both as it occurs on the pages of a screenplay and on screen, chiefly because the assimilation of that French phrase into common English vernacular is something akin to what Tarantino appears to be attempting by allowing the inter-bleeding of three languages (German, English and French), here. What he engages in, and subsequently engages the viewer in, is not merely a power-play between the proponents of these languages, and an analysis of intricacies of dialect within those languages, but rather a demonstration of the power of conversation, in any language.

Even though the very fact that different languages are spoken may suggest that those differences are indeed the point of the conversation, that’s quite possibly only because audiences in Britain and America are exposed to them so rarely in mainstream cinema. Germans usually talk English in German accents. Ditto for the French. And the Russians. Subtitles, outside of actual ‘foreign’ cinema, appear to be frowned upon. Twenty-minute scenes almost entirely composed of them certainly are. Yet they don’t matter. Such is Tarantino’s pride and obvious enjoyment of his own writing that it doesn’t even need to be spoken in a language common to the audience for them to appreciate it. For them to hear the rhythms in another tongue and to read it on the screen is enough. Because, without wishing to fawn over this all too much, the dialogue simply works. It translates from screen to audience, and that is all that is needed. Watching that scene, I was practically rapturous at the way he plays with the positions of the participants, even at the same time as he flaunts his love of the very thing he’s doing. It is what a great conversation should be, as scripted and acted out in a film. It entertained, it told me a great deal about the characters of all involved, and it made me think. It conveyed a point which should have been previously clear to me (the King Kong as metaphor bit) without making me feel stupid, even as it made the character speaking it (and, by extension, Tarantino) look smart.

That, however, is the problem that (long) conversations seem to encounter when placed into movies. Car chases, explosions, gunfights, fistfights, catfights…none of those things necessarily trigger the ‘Hey, we’re watching something that somebody’s written’-reaction; they don’t have the same potential to instigate an awareness that jolts one out of the escapist mode that is, in many ways, essential to the cinematic experience. Perhaps arguing about the point in relation to Tarantino films (with the possible exception of Jackie Brown) is, well, pointless, given the self-aware postmodern approach he takes to the cinema, and his conversations are often used, as in Inglourious Basterds, to generate excitement, to really work the audience into feeling the same joy in those lines of dialogue that he feels. In other films, by other directors, however, the issue may just come up.

Perhaps it has something to do (in a broad sense) with a mainstream allergy to in-depth character development. Oftentimes, all that is used, and needed, to establish characters that exist within plots, are a few lines of dialogue (e.g. ‘My wife just left me’, ‘I’m just gonna have one more drink’). That is it. It brings the character in question into the viewer’s focus. They have a fact to work with and a trait to watch out for in future scenes. They have been included in that character’s life. In fact, it is more likely that latter point which hints more clearly at a reason why audiences may not be as likely to look for conversation in films as a buying-point.

Afterall, if a character has a voiceover, which helps to flesh out his back story, his opinions and convictions, well, that’s fine. Because that is a conversation that character is holding with the audience. They are being included in that character’s part of the story much more deeply.

Yet, if a character is sat down revealing that same information to another character, all at the same time, rather than in a voiceover’s fragmented bursts, there is the possibility that the viewer will feel too much like exactly that, a viewer. A voyeur. Cinema audiences are inherently voyeuristic, but not too many people really like being made to feel like that’s the case, too much. There is the possibility that the viewer will start to feel alienated, rather than drawn in, as if not enough attention is being paid to the fact that this film they’re watching is meant to be about entertaining them, not about one character desperately trying to entertain another, or to seduce them, or to confuse them.

A case in point may be The Big Chill, which I watched for the first time this evening. It consists of a group of old college friends reconvening after the death of one of their other friends. And that is about as much ‘plot’ as there is. The rest is just those friends catching up with each other, sitting/standing/running around talking. None of them really go anywhere. Much. So, if two hours of talking isn’t your thing, avoid it. But then, a big part of the point of this film is that it’s pretty much everybody’s thing. We all have friends we like to talk to, and can talk to about things all night, and all day, and just generally exist around. And if we don’t anymore, we all wish we did. All conversation is connection. And this film is about stimulating those connections, about trying to keep hold of them when all kinds of pressures seem to be intent on breaking them down or pushing them apart. It’s about the pure magnetic trust and comfort and honesty that makes for the best and most lasting friendships. And, whilst that is a different use of conversation than usually used by Tarantino, it is still aimed at entertaining the audience, even if it’s knocking on a different door. Yes, you may become aware that these people are all just acting these parts, if the conversation goes on long enough, but hopefully in that case you’ll feel a greater need to immerse yourself in conversations with friends that aren’t acted. There is a plus side to every negative review.

Personally, I enjoyed immersing myself in these characters and their (hi)stories and relationships, even as I sought and picked out things within those relationships to remind me of my own, and of the way I feel about certain people I know. It made me feel that I miss them, and, even though I saw two of them this past weekend, I could happily see them for as long a time again right now. Again, this is me trying to bring something to the table, trying to include myself into a situation where I have been invited but not necessarily dragged to the table and made to sit down in the spare chair. I am involving myself. I am making it my business to know these people/characters better, because they are there and I am near them. If I didn’t, then I would feel alone, and all the more lonely for the fact that they are not. In enjoying the fact that they have company, I find I can enjoy theirs, and also my own.

I like to listen, I think, to the things that people say. It is not simply an impulse towards eavesdropping, towards being in the loop, but more a desire to just understand my species, the way our minds work when we are with other people. Advanced and intricate communication skills are one of the most complete and brilliant benefits of our evolution, and it is no small pleasure to encounter them and to hear them in an environment where those benefits are understood, and where their delights are so freely on display. And so the experience of conversation on film, between two people, however simulated, feels, in some way, completely honest.

One of the most beautiful instances of this honesty occurs, for me, in the relationship and interaction between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy’s Jesse and Celine in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise. Their conversation feels fun, challenging, occasionally uncomfortable, and there are moments where they just stop talking. In other words, it feels natural. I don’t feel lonely when I watch it, in any sense, but I do afterwards – firstly because I miss that conversation as soon as it is over, and secondly because I’m instantly and instinctively in the mood to talk to someone, and yet it’s the kind of film I only seem to watch when I’m alone. It instils in me a deep longing to be part of something, and to keep being part of it’s own something. Not since my constant re-watchings of action films in the testosterone-fuelled days of my (younger) youth have I felt such an urge and desire to re-view films upon the very instant of their ending as I do recently.

It is the same with Lost in Translation. And indeed, that is somewhere near where I was initially intending to direct this piece – towards the suggestion and consequent consideration of the observation that good conversation seems to find a much larger audience in films when those films are set somewhere off home-ground. When there is further distance for those words to travel (hence the title). But maybe that theory isn’t so important right now. What matters is that there’s still something worth saying and worth hearing being said anywhere at all. That evolution’s prizes are not being entirely wasted, and that all the thoughts we keep having are put to at least one potentially-wonderful use.

Watching Gilbert Grape

I find myself laughing a lot at good films lately; at films which are reputed to be good and which I find to be so. Not all of these films are funny. In fact, most of them aren’t, at least not for much of their length.

But I laugh. Or maybe I don’t. Rather, I think that more often than not it’s just a smile I can’t stop. Which, on paper (or screen) might read ridiculously. Say it aloud and it probably sounds ridiculous too. Yet I don’t think there’s a better way I can say it. I suppose that it’s similar to how I feel when I’m falling for someone, but I really don’t want to digress.

Having said that, however, it seems that love is probably the most appropriate word for how I feel about film, about what film can achieve. It’s certainly how I feel about film when I see movies that don’t amaze me simply because of what I want to believe about them, but instead because of what they make me believe. Indeed, having somehow avoided watching Citizen Kane for the first 23 years of my life, I wasn’t sure what I expected from it, upon finally sitting down to watch a copy I was bought for my last birthday. Perhaps some part of me actually wanted to be disappointed by it, to achieve some special and peculiar sense of gratification from being one of the few people I’d heard talk about it who didn’t hold it in such high reverence. I don’t know quite why this should have been (to witness Orson Welles’ face upon his entrance in The Third Man is to know that what it projected wasn’t just acting – it was the face of a man in complete control of his every intention), and, sure enough, upon Kane’s ending, I had no clearer idea as to why I’d entertained thoughts of disapproval. There is no target at which that film aims that it even comes close to missing. It is as perfectly realised exploration of an idea as I’ve ever seen. Judging by such rampant hyperbole, stirred within me by this viewing, I was once again sure that film and the cinema was clearly the object of my deepest artistic affections.

And yet, that I had to be reminded of such a thing is indicative of the fact that I had taken some time off from fully indulging certain of my mind’s passions, that I had taken the very things that I had turned to so often, for help and entertainment, for granted, without giving anything back. In all those shadowy conversations with cinema screens and TV sets and computer monitors, I had been a silent partner. It might have seemed like I was just being a good listener, but the only way you can be sure of that is if the listener talks back to you about the things you’ve said. I didn’t. It is the same with books, and music, and paintings, and sculpture. Good or bad, they are designed not merely to entertain, but to engage the reader/listener/viewer. They are a part of the artist that they have chosen to shout out into the world, and if all that comes back is an echo, than it has furthered neither them nor the world any for them to do so.

One of the aftershocks that has persisted as a consequence/reward for finally viewing Welles’ first masterpiece, is that I have been thinking a lot more about the ways in which film moves me, and why. I have been trying to further understand myself, to comprehend the mechanisms by which I am most deeply touched and entertained by art; not to disprove or question them, but to embrace them, and to marvel. This may sounds like too romantic a viewpoint to take on such issues, and perhaps it is, but it suits the way I am right now.

Indeed, after watching a film the other night (What's Eating Gilbert Grape?), I got to thinking about the first time I was sure I was enamoured so completely with cinema and everything that came with it. Perhaps it was a subconscious rendering of my attempts to patch the distance between that time and now, to fix the wounds and the spaces left inside my head from disregarding it. Perhaps it’s just one of those things that occasionally slides into my mind when I’m content.

That first time, though…that moment has been preserved with rare and mythic clarity. It is an oddly pristine specimen in those dust-gathering museum halls behind my eyes. It happened during the last time I watched The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, about 3 years ago. Aside from the pratfall that leads into the last section of the film, that scene is not outwardly too comedic (although, admittedly, there are healthy doses of Leone’s mordant wit throughout), but I felt the laughter building in my body as I watched. The shot that begins that scene, leading from Eli Wallach’s clown-like tumble away from a cannonball’s impact, is, again, perfect. Indeed, whilst I wouldn’t wholly agree with Tarantino’s assertion that the film is the best directed in history (in fact, I’d suggest that Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West is more consistent…), I do not think I have seen anything more astounding on any screen, small or big, that fully compares with the wonder of that shot, the way the camera spins and tracks Wallach through the avenues of that dusty graveyard with a manic, poetic intensity matched only by Ennio Morricone’s accompanying score. It encapsulates the view that the true fullness of life is to be found in the quests and journeys that we take on our way through it, and, dizzying as some may find it, that shot is a joy to me. That everything preceding it is nearly as good and most things that follow are better is testament to the genius of the work and those who made it. I have seen Brando toying with the shadows in Apocalypse Now, Walken playing with a revolver in The Deer Hunter, and De Niro throwing punches at the air in the flawless black and white of Raging Bull, and yet I still don’t think I’ve seen anything to quite match the way that seemed to me that day.

But, even if nothing ever beats that moment when I first started falling, I know this feeling is going to last, because, as I said, I’m laughing and smiling at films more than ever of late. I recently caught Up in the Air, and, for a good half hour section of that film, couldn’t contain my grin. Last weekend, I watched Bertolucci’s The Conformist, and a simple camera movement nearly made me laugh and cry at once, just because of the colours and the sly curve of the line along which the lens shifted. Everything that follows the conversation that forms the centrepiece of Godard’s Breathless felt like the lead-up to a gut-punch, even as it drew a smile across my face.

And that’s what this love of film is to me. It is topsy-turvy and upside down and direct and straight-shooting. I laugh sometimes at lines that are more touching than funny, and I cannot stop weeping as I watch certain scenes in certain films - whether it is with joy or distress doesn’t matter so much some nights, it only matters that the film has reached me, seen who and how I am, and shown me something glorious in return. The smiles and the tears and the laughter are simply my part of the conversation that these films and I hold in the dark, and some of this writing is what happens when the credits roll and I don’t want to stop talking back.