Film Analysis

The movie that we are going to analyze based on the influences of French new wave is Pulp Fiction, directed by Quentin Tarantino. The movie contains 3 sub-stories in which the characters’ roles are intertwined dealing with the ways of life, living in the cruel world of drugs, gangsterism and sex. There are 2 hitmen, Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield, their boss Marsellus Wallace and his wife, Mia, a boxer named Butch and two robbers, Pumpkin and Honey Bunny.

Synopsis
Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace’s Wife
Before Vincent was ordered to stay close to Marsellus Wallace’s wife, Mia,and to accompany her for the whole day, he went out to buy some high quality heroin from the drug dealer, Lance. Vincent entertained Mia by taking her to a restaurant for dinner and went for a dance competition where they won a trophy. When Mia accidentally sniffed heroin from Vincent’s jacket which she thought was cocaine, she passed out and things went out of control for Vincent.

The Gold Watch
There is Butch, a boxer who killed his opponent violently and decided to run away with the prize money which Marsellus had betted on him to win the title. He and his girlfriend, Fabienne decided to leave the motel and fled the country the next morning, when Fabienne told Butch that she had left his father’s gold watch which he had kept as a family heirloom in his old apartment. Butch returned to collect the watch. Whilst there, he encountered Vincent and Marsellus and then tragedy strikes.

The Bonnie Solution
The story started three days earlier when Vincent and Jules survived an attempted murder, killed the thief, Brett and retrieved the briefcase containing the stolen prized possession back to their boss, Marcellus. Jules is convinced it is a miracle they are still alive. They then left with Marvin, one of Brett’s gang member and questioned him about miracles when Vincent accidentally shot and killed him in the car. The only person they could turn to was Jimmie their friend. Real trouble begins when Vincent and Jules had to find a way to dispose of the body and the car before Jimmie’s wife, Bonnie returns. After disposing the body and the evidence, both hitmen went to a diner before sending the briefcase to Marsellus when they encounter two robbers and try to get out of the situation.

Film Analysis of Pulp Fiction
Regarding to the synopsis above, French new wave has influences the narrative form of Pulp Fiction where it applied non-chronological approach. Director of Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino purposely made distinction in narrative and experiencing different style in storytelling. Instead of present the film in linear structure such as three act structure and hero journey where audience can straight away understand the movie and follow the flow of the film form shown by the filmmakers, Tarantino choose to use teasing and twisting plot to urge audience think about the film.

In Pulp Fiction, the story is actually breaks into three different pieces of stories, at the same time, tightly connected to each other. Scene by scene are like puzzles and audience need to join them together and rearrange the visuals to get the whole story. The teasing opening, unexpected plot twist and ambiguous ending make this film outstanding and enable audience to think about the meaning of this movie rather than giving them literally meaning. For example, this movie begins with two robberies, Ringo and Yolanda's conversation in a restaurant. Once they decide to rob, they are pointing the gun to the restaurant customers, it then fade into black and opening credit shown. After opening credit, the scene that we watch next is not a continuous scene from the previous one. The new scene begins in a car, showing conversation between Jules and Vincent. This unconventional sequences attracted audience attention as the story is out of audience’s expectation. Audience will not get bored and tend to find out or guessing what this story is about, what will happen next and these unexpected sequences is actually arousing audience interest in watching the film.

Moreover, the ending part of Pulp Fiction is interesting where the scene get back to the same location and it is actually a continuous scene of the opening teasing. From the unusual editing style and plot construction of Tarantino, audience has opportunity to choose what they want to watch and trying to understand this movie from different perspective. Audience may have their own interpretation toward this film; some audience may view it from Butch’s perspective and some maybe from Vincent’s. At the mean time, audience can put the scene together and arrange it based on their creativity.

Furthermore, French new wave style of filming used to have shooting on real location rather than shooting in a theater or studio in order to let audience experience the reality and the life of the characters. The shooting locations from the Pulp Fiction are presented in casual way whereby we could see coffee shop, pawn shop, apartment, corridors and club. All of the location chosen let audience experience and we are expose to the foreign country’s lifestyle. For Asian audience like us, we never been in western country; but we could actually experience the western life style throughout this movie and expose ourselves to western style of restaurant and club.

In addition, the available light and simple supplemental sources are used rather than using three point lighting. So, we could obviously notice the lighting are from natural sunlight and create imbalance light reflection and shadows throughout the whole movie. One of the examples would be the corridor scene showing Jules and Vincent conversation. The brightness of Jules and Vincent is imbalanced as the light sources only come from windows and door. While they are walking in the corridor, you will notice the lighting is brighter with exist of windows and become dim when the light ray from window could not reach the two characters. We believe that this kind of lighting is used to make the visuals looks reality as what our eye seen in our daily life and give audience some aspect of experiencing the real things.

Apart from that, the cinematography of Pulp Fiction which influence by French new wave could be seen in the camera movements as well. The camera tends to pan and track to follow the character’s movement. For example, the camera tends to follow Butch movement in the Marsellus Wallace’s bar. After conversation with Marsellus, Butch order food and meet Vincent, when Marsellus called Vincent, Butch turn around and look at them. The camera panned and follows his moving, at the same time emphasize on his emotion with a close up.

Besides Butch, we could also see the camera following Vincent’s movement in the Jackrabbit Slim’s, a bizarre retro 50's club where he is curious about the place because he had never been there before and with the request of Mia, he enters that place. We as an audience are very curious about this place because the very first image that we get from that place is a car toys racing platform. The panning and tracking on Vincent’s movement brings audience to the atmosphere of the place and give audience a clearer image of Jackrabbit Slim’s.

In the beginning, we thought Vincent Vega is the protagonist of Pulp Fiction. He will be the important person or so call protagonist who will connect all the scenes together at the end and achieve his goal or success. However, when Vincent die in Butch apartment, audience get shock, and we had lost our direction that who are we going to follow and focus on. Then, camera change the target to Butch and audience had new person to follow in order to understand what the story of this film is. Sudden change in the middle part of movie is quite confusing and both Vincent and Butch seem aimless. Vincent killed occupants and accompany Mia because of Marsellus’s order; and his story end when being killed by Butch. Similarity to Butch, his intention in this story is not clarified as well. Therefore, lack-goal oriented protagonist is also inspired by French new wave.

Besides that, the dialogues of this movie are presented in very casual way and it is scripted as reality as possible. The unusual dialogue style is weird to a film because film most likely used beautiful words, short and precise dialogues, very dramatic and emotional sentences. In comparison to Pulp Fiction, the characters usually talk a lot, minimize the emotion in convey the dialogues and keep repeating their words. For example, the discussion of Vincent and Mia regarding the death of Antwan(Tony Rocker Horror). In the movie, Vincent keep repeating his dialogue such as well, well, I do, I do and all right, all right. That is the way we interact with people in reality as well. Then, a very long, nagging and twisted dialogue delivered by Vincent,

Vincent: “well, that is one way to say it. Another way to say it would be that he was thrown out. Another way would be he was thrown out by Marsellus and yet even another way is to say he was thrown out of a window by Marsellus because of you.”

Mia then summarizes Vincent words into short and straight forward way; Mia: “you heard Marsellus threw Tony Rocker Horror out of a fourth-story window for giving me a foot massage?”

The redundancy of dialogues appeared to give audience a very clear picture on the discussion issue address by characters. Therefore, uncommon dialogue usage such as live conversation enhance on the narrative because the director want to be that way and reflect our reality life.

In conclusion, the influences of French new wave do enhance the film form, narratives, plot structure, mis-en-scene, mis-en-shot and dialogues of the film today, especially in Tarantino’s film and Pulp Fiction is one of the examples of Tarantino’s film inspired by this film movement.