Panderer and Poet

KILL BILL, VOL. 2 DIRECTED BY QUENTIN TARANTINO A THOUSAND CLOUDS OF PEACE DIRECTED BY JULIáN HERNáNDEZ

THERE WON'T LIKELY be a better film this year than Patrice Chereau's Son Frère, so the media anticipation for Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, Vol. 2 seems worse than hype—it's a refusal to accept anything new. Tarantino's obsession with pop culture trivia continues past the point of charm or amusement (the former excuses for his acclaim). He is in proud defiance of enlightenment, seriousness and innovation, the things that make pop matter. Snickers of recognition that greet his references to Hong Kong action movies, tv theme music and 70s soul records are, in fact, the sounds of cultural retardation.

The entire Kill Bill saga exhausts postmodernism and self-reflexivity. Tarantino doesn't use pop for its expressive potential; he is the icon of trash and boomer self-satisfaction that many use to justify their own preoccupation with frivolity. Throughout the two halves of Kill Bill (in which assassin Uma Thurman finally kills the man who massacred her attempt to marry into a normal life) the key emotion is not joy or grief but simply how kewl it is to watch a madwoman hunt down the ex-associates who ruined her wedding party and then "go Malvo"—a term coined by QT defender Richard Torres (and more modern than any actually spoken in the film).

Great movies teach us how to feel; smug movies like Kill Bill teach audiences to gloat. What separates Vol. 2 from the hodgepodge of Vol. 1 is QT's failure to create a single character with more than a cartoon personality. Maybe it didn't matter that every figure in the first film was outrageous or absurd, but here, where Tarantino intends an emotional payoff, he proves incapable of showing credible behavior. Thurman's Bride morphs through even more identities (Black Mamba, Arlene, Beatrix Kiddo) but remains shallow, a punching bag that rebounds. Trite movie references, not characterization, are all that motivate QT's story, and the Bride's final face-to-face with her pimp-nemesis Bill (David Carradine) offers little more than Sergio Leone and John Ford staging. The ex-lovers' dialogue is slick, not poignant. QT's snickerers know that they're supposed to feel mushy, but there's no fundament to respond to. These films have volume but no density or depth.

Youth's response to art will always be a key issue in pop culture. QT's films are useless because he cannot (sanely) claim youthful naivete. His refusal to grow up is worse than the fault that haters ascribe to Spielberg. QT is Peter Panderer—not just to hipsterism, but to commercialism. The pop referents in Kill Bill might as well be product placements congratulating viewers on the mindlessness they bought in their youth. When Pulp Fiction came out, that neo-nostalgia seemed a sign of cultural development; some of us have been waiting for QT's next cultural advance, but he doesn't have it in him.

Fortunately, pop's great step forward can be seen in the week's less-publicized opening, A Thousand Clouds of Peace, a film by Mexican director Julián Hernández. It's pop-fixated but very different from QT's hip-yahoo sensibility. Hernández constructs a love-lost story through the shell-shocked musings of 17-year-old Gerardo (Juan Carlos Ortuno), suffering his first heartbreak. Walking the streets of Mexico City, Gerardo's memories of long-gone Bruno are triggered by places they went on dates, the tantalizing appearance of other men, empathetic examples of love-struck women. Haunted by a love song from a movie he watched with Bruno, its languorous tune and peculiar lyrics obsess Gerardo:

A fearless man told me he'd love me to death/Those black eyes nailed my soul/Let me put near you the divine flame of a kiss.

The search for a record of that song—Gerardo's pilgrimage—structures the movie. Pop isn't just a youth cult placebo, it's the means for Gerardo coming to understand his part in the world, grappling with his portion of love and sorrow. Hernández realizes what pop culture is for, which makes A Thousand Clouds of Peace the perfect antidote to Kill Bill's mayhem.

Against QT's childish celebration of violence, Hernández (through Gerardo) worries that we don't know how to love. That's not a hostile Neil LaBute-style indictment, but a moral quest. This issue represents a major advance for a young artist subject to the glorifications of youthful privilege (recently illustrated by the trite eroticism and fake sadness of Y Tu Mama Tambien). Hernández is not a sentimentalist; A Thousand Clouds surveys a setting as modern as that in City of God. Gerardo's introspection is contrasted by a depersonalizing city. Emotional violence happens along with moments of uncertain connection, cruising that turns into a tryst or finally finding that song through the help of two bemused female street peddlers. They laugh at/with Gerardo, recognizing the folly of his search, or sharing the sensitivity of his passion.

The ambivalence captured in Gerardo's used vinyl discovery with the two women is the sign of true, penetrating artistry. In an Almodovar movie, torch songs frequently express his characters' shameless emotionalism. Here, Hernández foregoes Almodovar's campiness (and QT's facetiousness) to declare the gravity of Gerardo's feelings. That disdainful term "mope rock" betrays critics' hostility toward pop music that isn't cock rock. Hernández refuses both genres and transcends them by following Gerardo's (very libidinous) explorations to the point that other people's problems are illuminated. Gerardo fills Mexico City's desolate spaces with memory, imagination and regret. Cinematographer Diego Arizmendi occasionally flashes the b&w imagery for passionate intensity and a classical tone.

Hernández's full title, A Thousand Clouds of Peace Fence the Sky, Love; Your Being Love Will Never End, is extravagantly poetic but not half as hubristic as a two-part comic book movie that lacks emotional gravity yet repeats its few narrative tricks over a five-hour stretch. Kill Bill Vol. 2 begins in b&w with the Bride driving before a comical rear-projection of a desert road. When Gerardo remembers driving with Bruno (also in rear-projection), it recalls the isolated lovers in Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together, yet as Hernández's modernist esthetics kick in, his style comes to evoke the fervent emotional realizations in the great b&w films of Antonioni that bridged romance and existentialism. His good camera placement is worthy, but especially his close-ups of faces. Ortuno, a young Emilio Estevez, gives Gerardo an endless stare ("You look like a wandering soul," his mother grasps). His sojourn converges with Umberto's (Mario Oliver), a round-face cruiser with anxious eyes, whose lament, "I thought loving would give me something in return," echoes Gerardo's quandary.

Recurring shots of Gerardo on a highway overpass or a disused railway are mightily sophisticated images of his lonely torment. Hernández clearly uses music and cinematic evocations to elevate Gerardo's dilemma, but his basic sense of pop also connects lost souls. A pregnant, unmarried waitress, Anna (Perla de la Rosa), shares her familial hopes with Gerardo, who cynically retorts "Ties only sublimate." To which Anna innocently asks, "What is 'sublimate'?" Compare that to QT's zero moral confrontation. Kill Bill's dilemmas are brushed aside by fortune-cookie logic; the immature lust for violence rules.

If Tarantino were aware that indulging pop escapism has become a noisome form of exploitation, he might be able to shake off the insensitivity that vitiates his reveling in low culture. Romanticizing very bad people in Kill Bill is an obtuse way of sucking up to the thugs in the audience, helping them sublimate their own cruelty. Kill Bill outdoes Lars Von Trier in sadism. As soon as the Bride gets buried alive, you can see the Carrie homage coming a full reel away. It's an overly elaborate stunt that includes a claustrophobic aspect ratio and scary sound effects. But it's dumb next to the "impossible" shot in Dreyer's Vampyr showing the p.o.v. of its protagonist's own death.

Tarantino's gimmicks betray the uplifting capacity of pop culture. His methods are twisted and stultifying. Why mention that the monk who teaches the Bride his most lethal trick despises Caucasians and Americans except to make the film's appropriation of Hong Kong cinema by Caucasians and Americans a sweeter in-joke? This pop culture jamboree is for non-demanding filmgoers who prefer that pop culture be without feeling. More people might respond to A Thousand Clouds. Nothing in Kill Bill matches the scene where Gerardo spots a trim, muscled Adonis in Ciudad Azteca; the moment swells with an ironic operatic chorus, combining Visconti's erotic grandeur with Pasolini's verismo and ending with Buñuel's pitilessness. It's heart-rending pop in a real-world context. Hernández knows life; Tarantino knows crap.