Pulp Fiction.

Maybe you have to be able to see through Quentin Tarantino before you can enjoy him. Like all his previous movies, Pulp Fiction is packed with violent larcenies, shoot-outs, drug deals, mob executions, gangland politicking, and (a Tarantino specialty) heavy-duty, sadistically gloating speeches made by hitmen to their victims just before the bullet to the brain is dispatched. No wonder that this latest Hollywood wunderkind has been labeled the "hot high priest of film ultra-violence," "the Sultan of Sadism," and so forth.

Yet Pulp Fiction has about as much to do with actual criminality or violence as Cyrano de Bergerac with the realities of seventeenth-century France or The Prisoner of Zenda with Balkan politics. I make these comparisons respectfully, for this movie gives us precisely what the title of an earlier Tarantino script promised (however ironically) but didn't deliver: true romance.

Any romance must have an element of sham in its make-up. It comes with the territory and helps make the territory a tourist attraction. The gangsters of Pulp Fiction, taken as criminal studies, are strictly factitious. Their tough talk is wise-guy literate, media-smart, obscenely epigrammatic. Tarantino gangsters must be couch potatoes and video fiends when they're not slaughtering each other: they use the Fonz and the cute pig from Green Acres" as reference points and can spot the difference between Marilyn Monroe and Mamie Van Doren impersonators. I can't imagine one of these hoods reading anything as workaday as a racing form, but I bet all of them subscribe to Variety.

In short, Tarantino gangsters are actors in the flimsiest of underworld disguises. No Frank Sinatra heist flick (Oceans I 1, say, or Robin and the 7 Hoods) was so flauntingly unauthentic. The conversation of these hooligans may be spiked with the argot of Hollywood players and hustlers, but their lives are utterly devoid of the grunginess, boredom, pettiness, and the close attention to shady economics that you find in the memories and histories of real criminals. If gangsters really had this sort of wit, they'd be writing screenplays.

But the sham of romance serves the truth of romance. Cyrano de Bergerac may not be a believable portrait of a poet-soldier in the age of Richelieu, but he is a truthful embodiment of a chivalric ideal. Tarantino's gangsters are mere marionettes of violence but their dance is gripping because it's performed in the Theater of Destiny that is Tarantino's vision of life. When the hit men Jules and Vincent (Samuel Jackson and John Travolta) saunter out of a restaurant at the film's conclusion, we know that one of them is doomed and the other saved. Whence the doom? Whence the salvation?

In Pulp Fiction, significance saves. Refusing to see the significance of events, dismissing all circumstance as happenstance, refusing to believe that you are undergoing your own destiny can doom you. (So you have a destiny anyway - a horrid one!) Of course, the web of one's destiny always gets tangled with the webs of others, and a good part of the romantic excitement of Pulp Fiction lies in the way Tarantino lets us have a bird's-eye view of overlapping fates.

The movie is told in five chapters and a prologue:

Prologue: A husband-and-wife stick-up team (Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer) sit in a restaurant and discuss over coffee the best sorts of places to rob. The wife proposes that the very place they're in would be ideal. The husband agrees and they spring into action. End of prologue; the credits roll.

Chapter 1: Two hit men (Jackson and Travolta) murder some drug dealers who have cheated their boss, a drug lord named Marcellus. Then something happens to these killers that makes them return to headquarters. The pair look bemused, wrung-out, almost slaphappy. What happened? We don't find out until chapter 4.

Chapter 2: Travolta is ordered to chaperone Marcellus's sexy wife (Uma Thurman) while the boss is away on business. Travolta and Thurman are mutually attracted and mutually wary; then a near-catastrophe makes sex impractical and unthinkable.

Chapter 3: After accepting a bribe from Marcellus to take a dive, boxer Bruce Willis bets big money on himself to win and proceeds to massacre his opponent. He flees Marcellus's vengeance, then recklessly returns to his apartment to recover his dead father's watch. As a result, the boxer brushes up against death three times, once at Travolta's hands.

Chapter 4 brings us back to the hit men at the end of chapter 1. It is now shown that Travolta and Jackson were almost killed at the conclusion of their assignment, but their lives were spared. Jackson decides to reform his life, Travolta shrugs and is determined to go on as before.

Chapter 5: The two hoods have taken their philosophical argument to a restaurant which may look strangely familiar. Suddenly, Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer spring into action. We are back in the prologue! And soon Roth is moving toward Jackson for his money or his life. Jackson cocks a pistol under the table. But can he really kill a man now that he's promised God to turn over a new leaf?

The effect all this time-hopping has on our sympathies is both discombobulating and exhilarating. Travolta, for instance, is a killer in part 1. But in part 2 he's at the center of the action, is in peril, and, willy-nilly, we feel for him. But in part 3, Travolta is a killer again and this time...hey! he's trying to rub out this episode's hero, Bruce Willis. Then, in parts 4 and 5, Travolta is again in trouble, but he seems sullen and clownish compared with Jackson who is undergoing a spiritual conversion. And besides, because 4 and 5 take place before the events of chapter 3, we know how Travolta is going to behave toward Willis. How deeply can we sympathize with this young man? How thoroughly can we detest this young killer?

The script is put together with a jeweler's precision and makes the writing of every American film I've seen in the past year - even Quiz Show - seem like so much child's play. A couple of examples of Tarantino's canniness:

Chapter 3 opens with a flashback of Bruce Willis as a boy receiving his dead father's watch from a soldier who suffered with the father in a Viet Cong prisoner-of-war camp. The officer explains why he's been so zealous in delivering the father's bequest: "When you're together with someone in a pit of hell, you owe something to that person." Later, Willis will find himself in his own pit of hell" with his worst enemy, Marcellus, as fellow prisoner. Willis gets a chance to escape and leave Marcellus to suffer a slow, horrible demise. Why can't he bring himself to leave? Then the words come back to us just as they are probably coming back to him: "...you owe something to that person."

That's a compassionate moment but a more typical example of Tarantino's scabrousness immediately follows. Willis looks for a weapon to use against the serial killers. He's in a pawnshop, so there are several choices. He finds a hammer and hefts it. Not bad. But he exchanges it for a baseball bat. Better. Then he picks up a chainsaw. Better and worse. The audience starts to titter nervously. But wait, Willis has spotted something else on a high shelf and reaches for it. Samurai sword. The horrified laughter this sequence gets from the audience is the kind of reaction Oliver Stone tries to evoke repeatedly in Natural Born Killers (which is a drastic rewrite of a Tarantino script) with scant success. Tarantino achieves it time and again with fiendish accuracy.

Tarantino is a deft director of actors but for the most part he succeeds by getting his well-cast players to tread familiar ground. The exception is Samuel L. Jackson. He's played tough guys before but this one he takes to a higher plane. He makes Jules an almost Shakespearean reservoir of strength, cruelty, righteousness, intellectual showiness, loyalty, sadism, and compassion. He is titanic.

Tarantino is also adroit with the camera. Jackson and Travolta arrive outside an apartment only to discover that they're too early to execute a hit. "Let's hang back," Jackson says, and they do, literally, by walking away from the camera down a hallway. In long shot, they carry on a innocuous, funny conversation. Finally, it's time for the kill. Let's get into character." They walk into close-up and are once again frightening.

Or at least as frightening as gangsters can be in a Tarantino movie. The cinematic flourishes, the pop references, the movie-movie in-jokes, the glamour of the performers, the self-conscious hipness of the dialogue - all this cushions the violence, mikes it bearable, and, yes, even glamorizes it.

"Let's get into character." Indeed. These are actors being popped, not characters of substance. Go see Menace II Society or Good Fellas if you want the grime of crime. In Tarantino's hands, pulp fiction becomes sheer romance.