By Annette Seifert
It is difficult to label Tarantino’s latest – comedy, WW2 action flick, satire, transplanted Spaghetti Western; it all fits in a way. And always with a touch of trashy B-movies throughout, which works much better than basing a whole film on said trashy B-flicks as happened in “Death Proof”. Though the Spaghetti Westerns of Leone are probably the closest one can use as a comparison – both in style and Morricone music, as well as how the films treat their historical setting with an added knowing irony which should have died with postmodernism, but apparently didn’t.
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| Leone meets Tarantino. |
For a film that doesn’t pretend to be historically accurate in any possible way, it manages to say a lot about how history is constructed. Central to the plot is the screening of a Nazi propaganda film, a not too subtle hint at how history can be distorted and used, especially in the film medium.
At the same time, while the overall events are fictitious, they’re sprinkled with knowing nods and asides to German history, cinema, its stars and films of the time, and even a quasi-PSA sequence detailing how flammable silver-nitrate film-stock was. The usual Tarantino in-jokes and references to films and pop culture work better than in other films, in that they seem organic and give the film a much needed grounding to no descend into pure trashy comedy. Tarantino’s love of cinema is present as always. There is a beautiful shot of a woman’s face being projected onto smoke from burning film-stock which is brilliant in so many ways. And of course, references to directors and a joke about the auteur theory make it clear where Tarantino sees himself, completed by Aldo Raine’s (Brad Pitt) final line, which may seem like it’s a bit too much, but I’ll go with it being another instance of irony.
It comes as no surprise, then, that cinema, and a cinema, play a central role. The film is essentially split up into three parts. One follows Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), the SS “Jew Hunter” tasked with cleaning France up of Jews. The second narrative follows the Basterds, a troupe of Jewish soldiers who are tasked with doing the opposite of Landa, cleaning France of Nazis. The third centers on Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a Jewish girl who escaped Landa and operates a cinema in Paris. All three narratives converge when Private Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), the star of a Nazi propaganda film á la 1945’s “Kolberg”, takes a fancy to Shosanna and gets Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) to premiere the film in her cinema. The event brings out the Nazi high command, including Hitler (Martin Wuttke); a perfect setting for an assassination attempt that could end the war, using the Basterds, a British film critic turned soldier, Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender), and a German starlet, Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), a thinly veiled version of Marlene Dietrich.
The plot is ludicrous at best, but then it doesn’t take itself too serious to begin with. In that, the film may work best when contrasting it to the recent “Valkyrie”. One is a typical Hollywood film dealing with serious history and taking itself very seriously. The other is a typical Tarantino film dealing with a serious subject and taking itself anything but serious. It’s up to individual tastes which one is more revealing or truthful.
What makes “Inglourious Basterds” work, though, is the ever present tension and danger underlying scenes with Landa. Easy in a way, as he’s an SS officer and Tarantino doesn’t need to establish the fact that he is the evil bad guy. But his inhuman evil goes beyond Fiennes’s Amon Göth in “Schindler’s List” in that Landa is like an evil Columbo. A brilliant detective, his fumbling and almost charming personality barely masks the all too real danger his character presents, making the scenes involving him incredibly funny, yet always tension-filled. Much has been written about Christoph Waltz’s portrayal of Landa and he won the price for Best Actor in Cannes, but it cannot be said enough how brilliant a performance it is. Unsettling is the best way I can describe it and, in a way, it’s the perfect depiction of Nazi terror despite the frequent laughs he gets.
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| Best card game ever. |
The violence is graphic, even for Tarantino, and political correctness is missing as always. Yet it’s the kind of un-PC dialogue that unmasks the danger of a concept like political correctness, shown best in a scene involving a card game in a beer cellar.
In the end, liking or disliking the film may just be up to if a viewer likes Tarantino or not. Mel Brooks’s “The Producers” has been cited a lot, but Tarantino manages to add a dangerous edge to the satire that makes his “Inglourious Basterds” work better for me. I don’t think it’s surprising the film is doing so well in Germany. Not referring to all that "Jewish revenge porn" rubbish that has been touted by many critics, but in that it’s a sort of cathartic experience coming from an “outsider”. Which I think it had to.
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Published: 21/11/2009