THE SUCCESS of Quentin Tarantino will mean the cinema-goer is going to have to put up with many a half-arsed imitator. Step forward Tarantino crony, Roger Avary, and his laughably crap French film, Killing Zoe.
Avary is a 27-year-old American best known as the co-writer of Pulp Fiction. Killing Zoe is his directorial debut. It presents the exploits of a gang of low-life Parisian bank robbers whose heist goes horribly wrong. Sounds familiar? " Reservoir Frogs" was a jaundiced description by one French writer.
In fact the film only resembles Tarantino's work in highly superficial ways. Tarantino's films are always superbly structured, economically crafted, contain a rare literary quality stemming from the brilliance of the dialogue and reveal a dizzying universe of pop cultural styles.
Killing Zoe is a negation of all these qualities. It is akin to one of those seedy tenth-rate plane hijack films, where the only 'drama' arises from the anticipation of the hostages being shot one by one.
Avary's film is structured around an unconvincing emotional triangle between three characters, Zed (Eric Stolz), Eric (Jean-Hughes Anglade) and Zoe(Julie Delpy). Zed is a professional American safecracker summoned to Paris by his childhood friend, the Franco-American, Eric.
Eric is every Daily Mail reader's nightmare vision of a gerian-loving, fascist-firebombing, drug crazed journalist. he leads a gang of gun-toting, left-bank hippies on a mission to rob Paris's biggest bank on Bastille Day.
A messianic psychopath, he develops an homo-erotic bond with the naive Zed, thumping any woman who so much as claps eyes on his American friend.
Zed bed
But Zed tumbles into bed with a classy art-loving prostitute, Zoe. A rhapsodic night is ended when Eric violently boots her out. Zoe, however, has a day job at the bank.
When the heist goes disastrously wrong, Zed is forced to choose between loyalty to his fellow gang-members or saving the life of his new lover, now one of the hostages.
Most men have the good sense to keep their adolescent wet dreams to themselves flicts them on us with remarkable candour.
It is very hard to take the film seriously from the moment when Zed (who Avary describes as a self-portrait!) gives Zoe, the tart-with-an-art degree, her first 'on-the-job' orgasm.
French cinema gave birth to the modern 'lad' movie some 20 years ago with a young Gerard Depardieu behaving badly in Les Valseuses, and it is easy to trace this misogynistic lineage in Avary's decision to give his boy's fantasy some self-indulgent French art-house chic.
The absurdities of Killing Zoe are too numerous to detail, but Avary defends his film on the grounds that it "reveals the living-for-the-moment nihilism of my generation"
No, I'm afraid not. The nihilism plea is always the last refuge of the scoundrel direcpose or control over his work.
There are some funny moments. Zed and Eric trying to pet a dead cat will surely amuse even the most po-faced Shoreham protester.
Audition
And Jean-Hughes Anglade who has that Depardieu-like quality of appearing in every commercial French film, overacts magnificently. He wisely treats the role of Eric as an extended audition for the next Euro-villain in an Arnie or Sylvester Stallone blockbuster.
But no prizes for spotting a very in-jokey piss-take of Tarantino himself, with one of the gang members being portrayed as a pop cultural obsessive, wittering endlessly on about the best episode of The Prisoner.
Oh, how Roger and Quentin must have laughed together at that one.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No.77. 11 February 1995, Page 14 Facing mass unemployment, rampant employers equipped with savage anti-union laws, and a war on hard-won education, health and welfare services, the working class in Britain faces a real crisis - an avoidable crisis created by the historic failure of its official leadership.
Socialist Outlook exists to fight for a new type of working class leadership, based on the politics of class struggle and revolutionary socialism, to tackle this crisis.
The capitalist class, driven and politically united by its own crisis, its requirement to maximise profits at the expense of the workers, has been given determined, vanguard leadership by a brutal class-war Tory high command.
The Tory strategy has been to shackle the unions with legislation, and to fragment and weaken the resistance of the working class and oppressed, allowing them to pick off isolated sections one at a time, using the full powers of the state.
In response, most TUC and Labour leaders have embraced the defeatist politics of 'new realism', effectively proclaiming total surrender on every front, while ditching any pretence that they offer a socialist alternative. Every retreat and concession they have made to the employers and the government has simply fuelled and encouraged the offensive against jobs, wages, conditions and union rights.
New realism is the latest form taken by the politics of reforSOCIALIST OUTLOOK mism, seeking no more than improved conditions within the framework of capitalist rule.
Socialist Outlook rejects reformism, not because we are against fighting for reforms, but because we know that the needs of the working class - for full decent living standards, a clean environment, peace and democracy - can never be achieved under capitalrevolutionary tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.
Our socialist alternative is not based on parliamentary elections or illusions of peacetul legislative change. We fight to mobilise and unleash the power of the working class - the overwhelming majority of society -to topple the corrupt and reactionary rule of capital and establish its own class rute.
We struggle against fragmentation by building solidarity, working to link and unite the various struggles of workers, the unemployed, of women, of pensioners, of the black communities and ethnic minorities, of lesbians and gay men, of students, of youth - and of those fighting imperialism in Ireland and throughout the world.
Socialist Outlook is above all an internationalist current, in solidarity with the Trotskyist Fourth International, which organises co-thinkers in 40 countries world-wide.
Unlike some other groupings on the British left, we do not believe a mass revolutionary party can be built simply by proclaiming ourselves to be one. Too often this degenerates into sectarian posturing and abstention from the actual struggle taking shape within the labour movement, playing into the hands of the right wing.
Nor do we believe that the demands of women, black people, lesbians and gays or the national demands of people in Scotland and Wales should be left to await the outcome of a socialist revolution. The oppressed must organise themselves and fight now around their own demands, which are a part of the struggle for socialism.
But propaganda alone, however good, will not bring socialism. The fight for policies which can mobilise and politically educate workers in struggle, must be taken into the unions, the Labour Party and every campaign and struggle in which workers and the oppressed fight for their Socialist Outlook welcomes readers' I CONTINUE to find your coverage of the Bosnia crisis a source of confusion. You devote half a page of issue 75 to an attack on Militant, yet in truth they have given greater space to alternative viewpoints than Socialist Outlook.
I also find many of the formulations in your article deeply unconvincing. For example you suggest Bosnia has existed as a 'historic nation' for 2,000 years. This intro duces the un-marxist concept of a nation above people, since this 'Bosnia' pre-dates the Slav occupation of the Balkans by some 1,400 years.
You completely fail to place the struggle in its historic context, namely the break-up of a deformed workers state into a series of imperialist dominated, capitalist mini-states. And as you yourself admit, the differences between Serbs, Croats and Muslims are not of a national character.
Nor do I find the argument that an independent Bosnia would be multi-ethnic at all convincing. Those fighting for a truly multi-ethnic solution to Letters over 300 words may be edited. Serb Chauvinism would have fought to defend the integrity of Yugoslavia.
It is certainly true that the Yugoslav constitution allowed for the right to self-determination of its constituent republics, but this does not mean that marxists advocated its break up. Surely we stand for a truly democratic and voluntary socialist federation? It is one think for socialists to oppose the reactionary Chetnik war against the Croats and Serbs. But it does not follow that socialists should advocate Bosnian or Croat independence. That logic leads you straight into the camp of Helmut Kohl and Thatcher.
The logic of the Socialist Outlook position on Bosnia is that fraternisation between the working class of Yugoslavia is impossible. This is a downright capitulation to bourgeois nationalism and precisely the kind of view that capitalism seeks to propagate in order to maintain its rule world-wide.
John Laurence, Harrow. Warton 4 ON WEDNESDAY 23 February 1994 myself and others entered a British Aerospace factory at Warton, Lancashire, where - ---Hawks are finally assembled.
We were there to protest about the latest sale of Hawks to Indonesia. However we were prevented from progressing with banners through the plant and were arrested and charged with going equipped with the intent of causing damage.
We are defending ourselves at Preston Crown Court. An aspect of our defence centres on a section of British law that implies one can commit one crime in order to stop a bigger crime. In our case, we believed we could stop the greater crime of Hawks being used in the genocide of the East Timorese.
For more information, phone me on 01457 871609, or Email: [email protected].
Michael Bane, Colchester. Soft on WHAT a misleading article you carried by Ellen Moore [Why Blair picked fight on Clause IV, Socialist Outlook 76]!
in this article we read that the activity in defence of Labour's 'traditional social democratic, collectivist framework' by a broad alliance 'in defence of social democracy' is a 'struggle about Marxism or Liberalism as the predominant ideology amongst those opposed to the Tories.' There are three significant problems with this view.
Firstly the forces that defend Clause IV are not marxist or objectively defending something that is marxist. To suggest this fight to defend social democracy objectively defends marxism conceals the fact that the movement to defend Clause IV is not marxist. Isn't marxism for building a party which can act as the preparer and director of a workers' revolution? Do many Clause IV defenders concur?
Secondly marxism is not the same as collectivism. Marxism is more than collective action or collective ownership. The La-
letters. Send them to Feedback, PO Box 1109, London N4 2UU. Back Serbia or Thatcher?