My favourite Cannes winner: Pulp Fiction

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/apr/13/my-favourite-cannes-winner-pulp-fiction

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I — say — God — DAMN!

The intravenous jab of callous madness, black comedy and strange unwholesome euphoria in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction hits me as hard now as when I first saw it 20 years ago. I sometimes think this is what it must have been like for record-buyers when Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel was released. It all first broke out at the Grand Théâtre Lumière at the Cannes film festival in 1994: Pulp Fiction was in competition, up against world cinema’s heavy-hitters: Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt By the Sun, Nanni Moretti’s Caro Diario, Edward Yang’s Confucian Confusion, and perhaps most prominently Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours Red — widely tipped for the Palme D’Or. The jury president that year was Clint Eastwood; his panel-members included Catherine Deneuve and Kazuo Ishiguro. I sometimes wonder if there wasn’t an omen in the fact that Lalo Schifrin was on the jury too: the composer of the Mission Impossible theme tune.

On the final Saturday, producers Harvey Weinstein and Lawrence Bender got the call. When the Cannes jury finishes deliberating, certain film-makers and actors are asked if they might care to come back to Cannes to attend the Sunday prize-giving gala. No further hints. They tend to get back, pronto, the Americans usually on a studio-bankrolled Gulfstream V jet direct to Cannes Mandelieu airport, just outside town. (It is rumoured that Ken Loach, the year he won the Palme D’Or in 2006 for The Wind That Shakes the Barley, was persuaded to accept a ride back on a private jet, there being no regular flights on such short notice.)

Weinstein and Tarantino sat in the audience as the prizes were awarded: nothing for Kieslowski; a joint grand prix for Zhang Yimou and Mikhalkov, the jury prize for Patrice Chéreau, best director for Nanni Moretti. The options narrowed and the truth dawned on Weinstein who started jiggling around crazily and bellowing directly at the stunned Tarantino, who was sitting right by him: “You got the fuckin’ Palme D’Or!” It was a decision that cemented Tarantino’s status and reinvigorated the cinephile debate around US popular cinema: the Palme D’Or was an imprimatur which some saw as equivalent to Godard’s praise for Nicholas Ray.

What a thrill it must have been to see Pulp Fiction on that colossal Grand Théâtre screen. But on any screen, at any time, it’s still delirious and brilliant. At the time, all the talk was of Tarantino as the ultimate savant movie brat, the video-store clerk utterly steeped in movie mythology, utterly foreign to any literary tradition. Not quite right, the clue was in the title, and seen again now, what comes across quite as clearly are literary influences from Jim Thompson to Edward Bunker and Elmore Leonard.

Pulp Fiction is almost a portmanteau film, but not exactly. The stories intertwine in ways that make it something other than an anthology: Travolta and Samuel L Jackson are the banteringly cordial hitmen Vincent and Jules, working for Marsellus (Ving Rhames), who is highly protective of his wife, Mia (Uma Thurman), and about to conclude a payday from a fixed boxing match. Marsellus’s fighter Butch (Bruce Willis) is haunted by a childhood encounter with his late father’s best friend – an extraordinary cameo from Christopher Walken, who is an emissary from the Vietnam era, bringing with him a bizarre ghost of The Deer Hunter. Everyone’s destiny plays out with that of a couple of freaky stick-up artists, played by Amanda Plummer and Tim Roth.

The characters’ relationship with each other is at first mysterious and baffling. The violence of the movie is shocking and brutal. The N-bombs are a part of it, but Jackson’s utter centrality to the film, the position of overwhelming strength from which his character negotiates with all the others, is what keeps the film the right side of being objectionable – although, perhaps, only just. The narrative rhyme of the heroin scene and the adrenalin scene is pure inspiration, of a piece with this film’s needle-using hardcore outrageousness.

The musical soundtrack dovetails with the dialogue’s riffing and there is genius in the narrative switchback that allows Travolta to finish the film both alive and dead. Tarantino went to make other great films, such as Kill Bill: Volume 1 and 2, Django Unchained and Jackie Brown (this latter film sometimes described, I think a little obtusely, as his best). For me, Pulp Fiction is always the winner.