Requiem Pour un Beau Sans-Coeur (1993)

Tarrantino minus stupidity plus postmodernism.

On the surface, this film has the look of a Tarrantino-style crime caper, where everybody's more or less equally a cad, and violence is the only form of play. The filmmaker's peculiar moral vision develops very slowly, and even the most intent of observers will only start to figure out what he is really trying to say about the criminal life about five minutes from the end. But boy, does this movie resonate! I saw it once in the early 1990s and then couldn't find a single copy online for fifteen years, but I bet I remember every scene.

The trick of the film (without giving too much away) is that it manages to present the world from the perspective of a dozen or so deeply different personalities with almost perfect seamlessness. It has the sort of profoundly subtle self-reflexiveness that cultural theorists and critics were advocating loudly during the decade that is was produced, but that no other artist has to my mind ever come even nearly so close to achieving (with the possible exception of Primo Levi). I guess by at least one plausible standard, this makes it the best film of the past twenty years. And yet as far as I know it wasn't screened even once in the USA. Terrible pity. January 20, 2008

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