The Hateful Eight

The hangman (Kurt Russell), his victim (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and the general (Bruce Dern) discuss democracy

Why, in fact, the "Hateful Eight"? Because not the "Magnificent Seven", but something opposite. In addition, this film by Tarantino is the eighth in a row, and the number 8 is hidden in the adjective hateful (h8ful). The fans will help to settle the score. I myself went to the Oktyabr cinema, where, on such an occasion, they heroically installed a film projector on

70 mm to watch the film for the second time in this delightful format - and specially bought tickets for January 8 at 8 pm in the 8th row. Then I realized that the figure eight is actually a symbol of infinity. How endless is the snowy desert, through which the unsuspecting heroes of the film rush towards death in its first frames.

Death with sequel

Detractors (and Tarantino has more and more of them every year, as well as new fans) will sneer: they say, he has endless films, as much as possible! The Hateful Eight is actually three hours long, divided into six chapters, and doesn't rush anywhere. But from the very first film, Tarantino offered his viewer to enter into a conspiracy with himself - to enjoy the process, not the result. It is not for nothing that the plot of Pulp Fiction is so mockingly shredded and twisted that in the beautiful finale it only approaches the actual middle and the dead jokingly rise from the coffins to continue the rock and roll dance under Chuck Berry.

Far from the frivolous mockingbird whose reputation the director accidentally created in the 1990s, but a true pop philosopher, Tarantino invites us into the space of postculture and posthistory. It has happened before, many times. Passed phases of tragedy, farce and absurd confusion. Therefore, this universe is made up of quotes (it is impossible to identify them all even if you wish) and there is no point in waiting tensely for the denouement. Only if you do not send the laws of genre and history to hell, as the director did in Inglourious Basterds - where the Jews staged a terrorist attack and blew up Hitler at the height of the war, and in Django Unchained - where former slaves enthusiastically lynched sadistic planters.

But how much can you fantasize? In The Hateful Eight, Tarantino temporarily forgets about alternative history and blockbusters. He returns to the stage of his early cinema, to the conversational conventions and dramatic restraint of Reservoir Dogs, to the closed space and the primacy of dialogue over action.

A few years after the end of the Civil War, random strangers meet in a tavern lost in the snows of Wyoming. Almost like a joke: one bounty hunter, one cowboy, one woman, one Englishman, one Mexican, one black man, one old man, one sheriff. Almost everyone lies about who they really are, and those who tell the truth are still suspected of lying. The author is also lying: there are like eight heroes, but there is also a coachman plus a joker in the deck, hidden from view for the time being. That is, not so much eight as “ten blacks” who will, no doubt, get out of the game one after another. In a situation of bad infinity, there are simply no other ways to get to the denouement.

Revenge is served cold

Seemingly empty, drawn out, narcissistic intoxication with one's own wit (qualities inherent in even Tarantino's best films) overshadow the normal question: what is The Hateful Eight about? Let's start with what is silent here: about revenge, which so occupied Tarantino for four films in a row. The bride took revenge on Bill, the feminist stuntmen took revenge on the patriarchal maniac, the infamous bastards on the fascists, the freed Django on the white oppressors... It seems as if Tarantino has finally given up on his search for spectacular justice, possible only in movies, but not in reality. As the title says, all the characters in his new film are equally disgusting, they are not the prettiest "inglorious bastards" at all. By the end, the audience's fragile hopes for someone's decency are finally dispelled, and this is worse than those megaliters of fake blood with which Tarantino habitually floods the screen. The Hateful Eight is a film about the dark side of human nature, which the director, for all the declarative caricature of the method, takes very seriously.

The thug, nicknamed the Hangman (impressive Kurt Russell, whom Tarantino gave a second screen youth) is carrying the villain Daisy (one of the best roles of Jennifer Jason Leigh), shackled, to the town of Red Rock. His occasional traveling companion, Major Warren (usually virtuoso in every line and gesture of Samuel L. Jackson), was caught in a blizzard, as was the newly appointed Red Rock Sheriff Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins): once he and Warren fought each other in the war , but the surrender of the South forced the former enemies to peace. Having reached an institution called "Minnie's Haberdashery", instead of its holders - Minnie herself and her husband Sweet Dave - the travelers meet four strangers (old acquaintances Tim Roth and Michael Madsen, Mexican Demien Bichir and veteran actor Bruce Dern). In each of them, the Hangman suspects Daisy's accomplice.

Roth's character, a dapper executioner in a bowler hat and with a business card in his pocket, gives a whole lecture on the difference between lynching and organized justice. He, trying to avoid a quarrel, jokingly divides the space into "southern" and "northern" parts - Georgia will be at the fireplace, Philadelphia at the bar. But the border is violated immediately, and justice is blind. A political metaphor gradually emerges behind a local plot with a criminal smell. The Hateful Eight is a ruthless film about the structure of America the day before yesterday, today and tomorrow. The lawyers here are as bloodthirsty and partial as highway robbers, and the chivalry of the prim southerners means no more than the coarse innocence of the northerners. In practice, one another is always a wild beast, and human rights are granted to them only so as not to kill each other at the first meeting.

Without obvious regret, parting with the role of an infantile moralist, the grown-up Tarantino puts on sterile gloves of a satirist-diagnostician.

Something and others

Of the numerous references to The Hateful Eight, the most elegant is to John Carpenter's horror film The Thing with the same Kurt Russell. The music was composed by Ennio Morricone; unused themes are taken by Tarantino into his picture and supplemented with new ones (the soundtrack, which just won a well-deserved Golden Globe, is really excellent). The last frames directly refer to the finale of "The Thing", hinting that the only character in the film radically different from the rest - the woman in custody - was the very alien evil from outer space that killed, voluntarily and involuntarily, the rest.

Don't be so quick to accuse Tarantino of misogyny (remember his previous films); the heroine is just a catalyst. Immediately there is an association with another masterpiece of Carpenter of the 1980s, the fantastic dystopia "Strangers Among Us" - about aliens who have taken over the Earth. Ordinary citizens of America, as soon as one looked at them through unusual lenses, turned out to be enemies, invaders of our planet, subject to instant destruction. Isn't that how the psychology of a participant in any war works? Including, as the Hateful Eight shows, the war is formally over. Recognize the enemy as an alien, and it will become much easier to pull the trigger. In this sense, Tarantino's film is a superbly accurate picture of the social bitterness that the United States can only expect in the run-up to the presidential election, and Russia was swept away without any elections a long time ago. Whether it was the author's task or not, we have before us a surprisingly timely film, with all the carefully recreated attributes of a bygone era.

The most brilliant image of the Hateful Eight is a sacred artifact reminiscent of the cherished gold watch from Pulp Fiction (we will not name it to avoid spoilers). At the climax, the item turns out to be a clever fake. When the last islands of nobility and reason leave from under the feet, all that remains to survive is to return to this false shrine as if nothing had happened. Because if not she, then only pistols, handcuffs, knives, and other instruments of murder and torture will remain. Tarantino's cinematography has not become less violent over the years, but its cruelty has finally become fully conceptual. A study in crimson tones, the finale among the cooling corpses, under the howling of an evil blizzard outside the window. As if out of habit, this was filmed with an elegiac intonation of a happy ending. Soothingly heroic music behind the scenes, a skillfully taken frame ... A blatant deception of the viewer through cinema, forcing for a few seconds to forget about Tarantino's sarcasm and how endless human baseness is.

The figure eight is actually a symbol of infinity. How endless is the snowy desert, through which unsuspecting heroes rush towards death

A Tarantino film is as cold as a Wyoming landscape

Old Acquaintance: Michael Madsen as Cowboy

Tim Roth played the English executioner

Without obvious regret, parting with the role of an infantile moralist, the grown-up Tarantino puts on sterile gloves of a satirist-diagnostician

Favorite Tarantino Actor Samuel L. Jackson

*Фото: kinopoisk.ru, imdb.com*