Quentin Tarantino
Cinema Release
Inglorious
Basterds is an amazing homage to exploitation and cult cinema, it is a film
which will divide audiences, you will either “get it” or you won’t, no matter how
hard you try. Tarantino has taken inspiration from the quirky war film by Enzo
Castellari's The Inglorious Bastards (1978) and other over the top Italian war
classics. These films celebrated in the larger than life, the Nazis were super
evil and the Allies bad, dirty and nasty, but on the side of good. They used
stereotypes in a darkly humorous manner and were not above a bit of
exploitation cinema along the way. In many ways they were Westerns in the form
of war films. Tarantino has taken these as well as exploitation and cult cinema
and moulded it all into a truly marathon cult extravaganza. It is irreverent,
funny, dark, amusing and certainly memorable.
It
is 1941 and we are in German-occupied France. Colonel Hans Landa of the SS is
in charge of searching out a missing Jewish dairy family. He is fastidious
about his work in a sort of Hannibal Lecter sort of way. He is well dressed,
stylish, witty even urbane but at the same time brutal and vicious. He is
nicknamed the Jew Hunter; he slaughters a Jewish family hiding under the
floorboards of a farmhouse but the teenage daughter Shosanna escapes.
1st
Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) is a hard man; he has no time for Nazis and
expects his soldiers to kill them on sight collecting their scalps for him. He
has brought together a team of eight American Jewish soldiers to secretly
parachute into occupied France. (They are joined later by an insubordinate
German killer to make nine.) Their aim is to strike terror into the heart of
the German military by slaughtering as many soldiers as possible, leaving an
occasional individual alive (with a Swastika carved on their forehead) to tell
others of their ordeal. The team is so successful that the legend of one of
their number, the Jew Bear spreads and many Germans come to believe he is sort
of supernatural golem which can come and go at will. We experience the ferocity
of the Basterds in gruesome detail and also come to see Hitler at his most
manic and hysterical best.
Shosanna
has survived emotionally scarred and is seeking revenge, she lives under an
assumed identity in Paris running a cinema with her lover, a black Frenchman
named Marcel. She meets Frederick Zoller who is also a film lover, at the same
time he is not only a German marksman but a war hero whom Goebbels has
immortalized in film. Zoller tries to woo her to no avail but won’t take no for
an answer. Soon Zoller has convinced Goebbels to hold the premier of the film
at Shosanna's theater. She at last has chance at revenge and begins to hatch a
plan.
At
the same time The British have also learned of the premiere and want in on the
action, they do not know about Shosanna's plan, so they hatch one of their own
involving an English agent and the Basterds. They send arrogant film critic
Lieutenant Archie Hicox to Paris to lead the mission.
They
meet with double agent Bridget von Hammersmark who will arrange to get them
into the event as film buffs. However things soon come unstuck. The English
agent, arrogant and cocky, overplays his cards and a Gestapo agent picks he is
not German. An outrageous bar scene entails where everyone is shot and
Hammersmark shot in the leg. Landa arrives to examine the scene and finds an
autograph and shoe belonging to Hammersmark and is onto their game. Their cover
is blown but they do not know it.
The
new plan is that Raine, Donny and Omar will pose as Hammersmark's escorts at
the premiere. They will pretend to be Italian so their exaggerated accents will
not be as obvious. As the premiere unfolds, Shosanna and Marcel are preparing
to set the premises on fire having stacked high flammable film stock behind the
screen.
Landa
interrogates Hammersmark, losing his cool; he brutally strangles her with his
bare hands, the psychopath behind the man is revealed. He has Raine and Utivich
arrested but strangely leaves the other two in place. It seems Landa is a true
nutter, he is not ideologically devoted to any cause, including the Reich but
is only obsessed with himself. In a truly bizarre scene he negotiates with
Raine’s boss to gain immunity and lots of “goodies” in exchange for allowing
the war to end and his bosses to be slaughtered !
As
he is sacrificing all around him for petty gain, Zoller goes to the
projectionist booth to see Shosanna. This time her rejection is too much for him
and he becomes a problem, she shoots him but not before he can kill her as well
in true Shakespearean style. Marcel bolts the doors to the cinema shut and
enters behind the screen, as the film reaches its climax it is interrupted by a
new segment added in by Shosanna. She informs them they are all about to be
killed by a Jew. The cinema catches fire, the bombs go off and the two
remaining Basterds blast the rest of the Nazis to hell with guns !
Landa
thinks he has it made, but Raine advises that while he is obligated to deliver
him to American freedom, he feels Landa should carry a reminder of his past and
carves a very deep swastika into Landa’s forehead.
This
is truly stunning cult cinema, combining the feel of a Western, a war film and
exploitation cinema. It is loaded with classic dialogue, wit, humour and a very
dark sense of play. All of the characters are superbly played, from Christoph
Waltz as the Nazi you most love to hate to Brad Pitt as the head Basterd.
Tarantino
has a knack of playing with cinema in a way you least expect. He encodes all
sorts of strange cinema references into the symbolism of the film. For example,
when Shosanna prepares for her final mission, she dresses up in a red dress
with a black veil and becomes a femme fatale. As she does so the music in the
background is the Cat People theme by David Bowie. If you have seen Cat People
there is an obvious association being made between her transformation from
cinema owner to assassin with the transformation from human to cat woman in the
earlier film. Another motif is found in the end, as the Nazis are killed the
image of Shosanna comes out of the screen projected through the smoke repeating
the line “you are being killed by a Jew”. There is a strong resonance of this
image with the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the Shekinah, the feminine
side of God came out of the Ark of the Covenant and killed the Nazis. Here is a
secular version where a Jewish female comes out of the screen and does the job.
Tarantino seems to love to play with these images and create all sorts of
unusual motifs which add a real depth to the film, if you see them.
Tarantino’s
depiction of various nationalities is also intrigueing. Traditionally war films
and westerns tend to draw simple distinctions between the Nazis and the English
or Cowboys and Indians, here there is a strange sense of play. The Germans as a
people are actually underemphasized on the whole, Tarantino focuses in on
specific Nazi characters such as Hitler, Goebbels, Landa and Zoller, this is
significant as it moves away from the, at times, distasteful stereotyping of
all Germans as Nazis. The English are portrayed as somewhat arrogant and out of
touch. Mike Myers as General Ed Fenech is excellent but Michael Fassbender as
Lt. Archie Hicox superbly portrays the over confident arrogance marked by the
English upper class which, in this case, costs a lot of lives.
The
portrayal of Jews in Inglorious Basterds is unusual. The traditional portrayal usually
focuses on the pain and suffering of the Jewish people (and righty so) but
there Tarantino does something quite unique. In a way he creates a fantasy for
the minorities killed by the Nazis, in this story it is a Jewish woman and a
black Frenchmen who are able to bring down the heads of the Nazi empire and win
the war with the help of eight Jewish American Basterds and one mad German
traitor! The Basterds are all astounding tough and in your face Jewish people
with a “we are not goin’ to take no shit” attitude while Shosanna as the Jewish
heroine is truly sublime. The climax of the film as her image floats in the
smoke as the Nazis are killed is such a powerful moment. Tarantino is so
clearly creating a new myth for us where the minorities win, where a Jewish
woman and a black Frenchman can bring down a conservative fascist empire, I
just love it! It is a strange feeling watching this scene; sure it is a pulp,
cult film filled with over the top performances and a surreal sense of fantasy,
yet just for a moment experiencing the thought that the Nazis could be
destroyed by this interracial couple brings a chill of excitement and a thrill
of exhilaration.
There
are so many nuances and textures to this film, I found it visually appealing,
filled with complex symbols and motifs, loaded with great dialogue, superb
performances and a true B movie cult film plot. At the same time it was loads
of fun !
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