Pulp Fiction

Rating: 9/10 (25 August 2016)

It is very difficult to talk about Pulp Fiction dispassionately. The film was one of the most impactful of the 90s and created - and still creates - a number of direct and indirect quotes in movies, series and conversations on our day-to-day. Even those who do not like the film, and there is no sin in it, have to at least recognize the pop phenomenon that the second work directed by Quentin Tarantino generated.
The main feature of the film is its non-linear narrative. Many will say that it was not Quentin Tarantino who created this form to assemble and tell a story (or several), but he never said it was. There are undeniable classics as Citizen Kane, Rashomon and Annie Hall who ventured down this path, with undeniable success. Even the very Tarantino, discreet and cleverly, had tried to embrace this technique in Reservoir Dogs, his directorial debut enviable.
It turns out that what Tarantino did in Pulp Fiction was, on the one hand, to popularize this form of narrative and on the other, make it almost in its own narrative, giving the "Tarantino touch" it. Proof of popularization of non-linear narrative is the amount of films that followed this trend throughout the 90s and 2000s, culminating in perhaps amnesia and City of God.
About transform non-linear narrative into something her, this is one of the most misunderstood features of Tarantino. The director is accused of copycat, copycat and all kind of synonym for this, as if no other director to do the same or as if the own Tarantino had not already stated that copies but works like. But what the director can do is to turn all copy or borrow something in itself. We know that we are watching a Tarantino movie even though we presented the work by the middle. The same can be said for directors like Woody Allen and Steven Spielberg. If this is something good or bad, it is not here to judge. What is clear is that Tarantino knows to take what is apparently commonplace and make something with your signature and that's what he did with the non-linear narrative in Pulp Fiction became the basics in a structure that unfolds in several stories parallel and sometimes tangential, that at the end, make it evident the domain that the director has on the camera and on the assembly, besides the always present and always perfect soundtrack.
See, for example, the temporal leap Tarantino is in the middle of the film, when we see the little Butch (the character played by Bruce Willis) receiving a visit from Captain Koons (Christopher Walken), who lived with his father when the two were prisoners of war. All this scene, which tells a story with one long monologue Koons in a single plane-sequence, which does not deviate from the character, aims to demonstrate to us the importance of Butch's father's watch. This already happens in the middle of the narrative intersected Tarantino imposes, but when the flashback happens, we accept naturally, without awkwardness or without for a moment fail to understand what is happening. Today, we find that something obvious and unimaginative, but try to be transported to 1994, when Tarantino Pulp Fiction launched in Cannes almost as an experimental work and received a standing ovation for several minutes. Nobody before had built a movie like this, at least not consistently and telling several stories at the same time. And here, of course, fit the applause due to wistful Sally Menke's favorite automaker director and perhaps most responsible for the actual genesis of "tarantinesca identity."