How intriguing to hear that Quentin Tarantino’s new film is going to be about a film critic – the news has sent all of us in the film-critic community into a nervy tizzy of pre-emptive gags and warily dismissive tweets about what this means for the discourse. And The Movie Critic (a working title?) is reportedly to be Tarantino’s final film, his signoff. It’s no surprise that this fanatically encyclopaedic cinephile wanted this film to be set within the film world – but it’s not about a movie actor or a movie producer or a movie director, but a movie critic, surely a hilariously marginal, impotent and parasitical figure, who deserves no more than a walk-on part at best?
Well, the word is that this isn’t just any old film critic, but one based on the most famous film critic of all – Pauline Kael, the New Yorker’s legendary star. If true, it means that Tarantino faces the male-gaze challenge of creating a film around a woman who isn’t sexualised in any way, an intellectual blackbelt who saw off condescension from entitled men, like rival critic Andrew Sarris with whom she clashed on the ostensible issue of auteurism, but also, she suspected, the issue of men having a hard time debating a woman. Pauline Kael isn’t going to be putting her bare feet up on the car dashboard in this film. At least I don’t think so.
