Once Upon a Time In Hollywood
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie
Genre: Quentin Tarantino
The Nightingale
Director: Jennifer Kent
Starring: Aisling Franciosi, Sam Claflin, Baykali Ganambarr
Genre: Not Quentin Tarantino
There’s not much that Once Upon a Time In Hollywood and The Nightingale have in common. One is a convict revenge period piece that tackles historical Australian issues of gender and race. The other is one man’s homage to the stuff he likes the most. Yet if there’s anything that unites their directors it’s the issue of on-screen violence.
Jennifer Kent, the director of The Nightingale, in response to reports of people walking out on her film during the Sydney Film Festival, said she didn’t care. Quentin Tarantino, who has made a career out of graphic portrayals of over-the-top comic violence, no doubt shares the same attitude. For both of them, the violence is a means to an end.
Without violence, neither film would work. It’s not gratuitous when the violence being portrayed reflects the real-life violence that the films are based on. The Nightingale is all about the appalling violence that convict women and Indigenous Australians faced during early colonial times. And Once Upon a Time In Hollywood is an interesting alternate reality of the gruesome Tate murders conducted at the instigation of Charles Manson in 1969.
Neither film is great. The Nightingale runs out of steam and out of ideas, and Once Upon a Time In Hollywood is so vain and self-reverential that it includes deliberate continuity errors and so many in-jokes you’d need to watch it with Tarantino to pick them all up.
But at their core are big issues and convincing depictions, or at least interpretations, of reality. If it takes a bit of shock and an R-rating to get the film world to think about them, then so be it.
Rating: Four gallons of blood (at least, each).
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