By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Critic proof: a French take on Tarantino's latest
From the latest Cahiers du Cinema, an appreciation of Death Proof, that may or may not be inexactly translated from the French: “First comes the decision to start over the same movie twice. One could serve as a model for the other, the other as the commentary for the former, as if repetition sufficed to suggest a relationship. Pure hypothesis. Then come the gaps and scratches that impact the 35mm, stemming from a desire to reproduce the poor quality typical of “grindhouse” film prints. We could choose to see only fetishistic nods in them. Preferably, we will recognize a superior truth: Death Proof‘s race is first and foremost that of film stock. Chatter may abound, tires may crease, but without the stock, the two films would go limp, cut short. Machine law has replaced rhetorical construction. To speak, to drive, to film, it’s all the same high-powered bachelor car, thrust blindly on death boulevard. It’s the famous tiger’s leap into the past: film sets out from scratch, far from the digital, tongue hanging and feet to the ground. In this regard, Tarantino is the worthy continuator of two masters: one of the voice, the other of the road. Jean Eustache, as prodigious as he is when it comes to infinite monologues and who enjoyed saying: “The camera rolls, cinema makes itself.” And Monte Hellman who, at the end of Two-Lane Blacktop, set the film stock aflame after one last flying start. A film that unites the two, burning lips at the same time as the asphalt, is devoted to countdown, to combustion. Pure loss expenditure. You will notice that the longest gap happens at the end of a lapdance executed by Arlene/Butterfly for Mike, hence depriving us of its climax: the film stock rolls out pleasure, and a bit of pleasure goes up in smoke each time a photogram is missing. Like an abduction, and like a thorn in one’s desire for what will follow. Tarantino makes no secret of it, he runs on this projection. Indeed, in the interview, he does not explain Mike’s obsession otherwise: bumping into girls with his death proof car (as per the title) is his own way of reaching orgasm.”