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.
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