The 1972 movie masterpiece Quentin Tarantino can’t stand: “I barely got through it”
As much as he’s known for being a cinephile, which is fair when it feels like he’s seen almost everything, Quentin Tarantino isn’t a cinephile in the stuffiest, snootiest, and most pretentious sense of the word.
Well, he is, in some respects, but not in others. You can imagine certain subsections of motion picture obsessives gasping in unison when he embarked on one of his many tirades aimed at indisputable icons of the medium, with Tarantino shitting on several names who remain held in reverential regard.
François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Altman, David Lynch, Alfred Hitchcock, and John Ford have all been among them, and in a couple of cases, the feeling is mutual. Of course, nobody who loves movies needs to love the greatest directors because they’re supposed to, but the two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter gives off the impression that he adores being intentionally contrarian.
In addition to branding the current era as Hollywood’s worst ever, he also said Kevin Costner’s Horizon and Netflix’s The Rip were two of the only bright spots, which is hardly going to earn unanimous agreement. As far as he’s concerned, the 1970s have always been the decade to beat, but he struggled to even make it to the end credits of one of its many masterpieces.
It doesn’t usually take Tarantino too long to figure out which auteurs he’ll enjoy and which ones he’ll keep at arm’s length, and based on his assessment of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, particularly his 1972 masterpiece and landmark in European cinema, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, the German maestro won’t be troubling Sergio Leone as one of his favourite filmmakers.
“I love the idea of Fassbinder, but I don’t necessarily respond to his movies that much,” the Pulp Fiction creator explained. “I’ve seen about four of them.” Of those four, he didn’t have anything to say about Fox and His Friends or Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, but he was “disappointed” with Lili Marleen.
“I saw The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant,” Tarantino explained. “I saw it at the theatre, and I barely got through it.” The ambitious and innovative psychological drama, which unfolds entirely within a single room, is generally celebrated as Fassbinder’s magnum opus, but even at a relatively standard 124 minutes, he struggled to make it to the end credits.
Even when he did, he still wasn’t exactly impressed. Still, it could have been worse, with Tarantino revealing that during his days working at Video Archives, one of the worst things any of the employees could do to an unwitting customer was tell them that Fassbinder’s feature-length swansong, 1982’s Querelle, was worth checking out.
“Which, now, I kind of have an affection for,” he pointed out. “But it was so hated at Video Archives that to recommend it to a customer, you risk getting punched in the face.” He eventually grew to appreciate that one, but The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant has undergone no such reappraisal in Tarantino’s eyes.
Never Miss A Take
The Far Out Quentin Tarantino Newsletter
All the latest Quentin Tarantino content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.