Bad Boys Grow Up

Tarantino and Almodóvar finally make films equal to the ones they've always claimed as inspirations.

I don’t have space here to rehash the controversies over “Inglourious Basterds.” (Though Jonathan Rosenbaum saying it was “morally akin to Holocaust denial” takes this year’s honors for outstanding achievement in critical hysteria.) But it should be obvious what separates Tarantino’s film, one of the very great works of popular movie art in recent memory, from this moment in cinema.

For one thing, the punch of the film’s alternative history depends on the audience knowing something about the real history Tarantino is referencing — that alone distinguishes the picture from most contemporary movies whose only outside reference point seems to be their own marketing. Tarantino draws on the movies and legends that have formed our contemporary notions of World War II and plays with those sources, sending them back to us in a way that makes plain the bloodlust that has always lain beneath them.

But what really marks “Inglourious Basterds” as separate from what’s around it is the form of the movie. As much as anyone working in movies right now, Tarantino has revived the notion of the script as the basis for filmmaking. The inevitable descriptions of “Inglourious Basterds” as nonstop carnage, or just more of the expected atrocities of QT, is the work of lazy critics unwilling to go to the work of seeing what’s in front of them. Tarantino has developed a keen understanding of dialogue as a vehicle for dramatization, suspense, revelation, the peculiar crisscrossed strategies his characters bring to each encounter, and every word advances the plot, character, and everything else. That the film was a huge hit is a hopeful sign, proof that audiences may not need all action all the time to keep their attention, that American mainstream audiences may we willing, once more, to cater to adults.

Pedro Almodóvar has had an artistically rockier road than Tarantino, though he’s enjoyed consistent critical success. You couldn’t blame Almodóvar for understanding that the provocations of “Matador,” “Law of Desire,” “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” might soon grow rote — as they did with “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” Or that the pastiche/homage of “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” is the sort of thing a director can really only do once.

The trouble is that in too many of the movies that followed his early work, the director seemed to be halfheartedly repeating his stylistic excesses or giving into the dullness that his early films parodied. Praising a stinker like “The Flower of My Secret” (1995) as evidence of a new maturity seemed a way of putting down the sensibility that made his first work such a turn-on.

You couldn’t help but be astonished by the formal control of “Bad Education,” with its echoes of Hitchcock, or “Volver.” But you couldn’t help but notice the emotional distance in those films. Especially when measured against “All About My Mother” with its near-perfect balance of luscious style and heartfelt melodrama. Almodóvar may have been trying to revive the spirit of Douglas Sirk, but Sirk’s analytical, ironic, chilly rigor is temperamentally unsuited to Almodóvar’s hot-blooded extravagance.

Which is why the new “Broken Embraces” feels like such an achievement. You can note the influence of Hitchcock and Sirk; at times, the film feels like a collaboration between the two, but finally, it’s recognizably Almodóvar.

It may be just as odd to call “Broken Embraces” a piece of classical filmmaking as it is to say the same of “Inglourious Basterds.” Both of them are conscious of themselves as movies in ways classical Hollywood films aren’t. In the Almodóvar, films-within-the-film, one of them a reprise of “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” keep up an interplay between background and foreground. And the main plot makes explicit the entire movie subtext: A now-blind film director, Mateo (Lluís Homar) recalls his love affair with his leading lady, Lena (Penélope Cruz), the mistress of a powerful industrialist.

And yet for all this reflexiveness, “Broken Embraces” works as straight melodrama, and works in a way that doesn’t feel as if Almodóvar is straitjacketing himself into someone else’s style or, thank goodness, denying his satyr’s side. In the opening scene, Mateo seduces a young woman who has helped him across the street, and the method he uses (here’s a clue — he begins with “Let me feel your face”) immediately alerts us that Almodóvar the provocateur hasn’t gone into hibernation. There’s no sentimentality in the scene towards the disabled Mateo, just the sly comedy of a practiced cocksman using another quiver in his arsenal.

It’s that sensual side that’s been missing in the “mature” Almodóvar and it’s what allows the affair between Homar and Cruz to achieve real emotional intensity and not the dry simulacrum of intensity in too much of the director’s work.

William Hazlitt once suggested that the most progressive work is the work that builds on the past. Genius, he thought, was too singular to build on. But lure an audience in with the traditions they know, and you can take them in all sorts of unexpected places.

Both Tarantino and Almodóvar are reckoning with our movie past in their new work. “Broken Embraces” ends with a film being put together, “Inglourious Basterds” ends with film being reduced to ashes. Both metaphors work for the paths that Tarantino and Almodóvar have taken. Not stuck in our movie past, they’re not ignoring it either, but using it to point a way out of the stagnation and rot of our movie present.

[Photo: “Kill Bill: Vol. 2,” Miramax Films, 2004; “Motherhood,” Freestyle Releasing, 2009; “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” Orion Classics, 1988; “Broken Embraces,” Sony Pictures Classics, 2009]

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