Too tarantinian to be a Tarantino

Rating: 8/10 (6 October 2019)

This movie is often received as something different from other Tarantino's movie, so there are lots of people that don't appreciate it. In my opinion, instead, even if it isn't too much à là Tarantino because of there aren't too action and dynamic scenes, it is the regular result of the citation theme of Tarantino's movies.
All the film is based on this opposition: Bill and Rick. The first one is a double, the second is the real actor, in a moment of decline. They live near Sharon Tate and the place in which Charles Manson killed her. Now, the opposition generates this situation: the real actor can't live well in the real world (he is in decline, he doesn't manage to reach the great Hollywood as he wants), the double, that's the fake actor in movies, but does the real dangerous scenes (instead Rick avoid them), is able to live in the world (does material tasks, killed his wife, fights and wins against Bruce Lee, that, moreover, is an actor revealed in his weakness outside the set).
This mechanism guides the story to a series of situations in which Bill, even if he his who works behind the real actor, manages to do what he wants to do. Until the murder scene: hippies enter in his home and have a fight with him, losing. Also this scene is based on opposition between reality and fiction: the killers, in fact, say that they want to kill the people that teached them to kill, so the actors; at the same time Bill, that had a Lsd dose, thinks that's cruel reality that is happening is just a drug effect (amazing that scene in which he and the killer are one in front of the other, the killer with a real gun, he with a gun made with fingers); moreover all the fight is had between murderers and the double, even if they reached Rick, that instead is in the garden and his action is to kill the hippy with a weapon from a cinematographic set.
So, all these things and others (it is the double that goes to the hospital; Tate's murder is leaves outside the movie's space etc.) suggest how strong is this opposition between reality and fiction, that's the typical condition of tarantinian art: the citational system, that's not just a game, but is analyzed in its minimal composition, thought as an estethic question and at the same represented as a concrete mechanism of violence and degradation (of '60s Hollywood, that's showed with a great historical fidelity).