Film review: Inglourious Basterds

Published on Thursday 20 August 2009 19:11

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (18) **** DIRECTED BY: QUENTIN TARANTINO STARRING: BRAD PITT, MÉLANIE LAURENT, CHRISTOPH WALTZ, DIANE KRUGER, MICHAEL FASSBENDER

MUCH like its absurdly misspel-led title, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds stands out in a summer of easy, cheesy franchise films. A remake in name only (sort of) of Enzo Castelleri's hitherto little-seen 1978 Italian Dirty Dozen rip-off, it's a genre-defying, artistically daring, always entertaining Second World War movie full of period pop-culture references, anachronistic soundtrack choices and a refreshingly honest rejection of the need for historical veracity. In other words: it's pure Tarantino, predictable only in its unpredictability.

Set "Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France", it's a film that flies in the face of convention, re-imagining the latter years of the war as a demented piece of pulp fiction, far removed from the sombre, serious, sanctimonious tones favoured by Saving Private Ryan and its ilk. Which isn't to say Tarantino has used creative licence to create a cartoon. It's not a balls-to-the-wall action movie, a slapstick homage to men-on-a-mission movies or a violent riff on Mel Brooks. It has elements of those things, to be sure, and, in places, its rendering of historical figures deliberately slides into the grotesque, but it also goes to places that are dark as night and fraught with tension.

The opening salvo, for instance, is a masterful display of understated emotional terror, one that plays on the kind of callous Nazi indifference to suffering we're used to seeing in cinema, but ratcheted up several notches by having a creepily civilised SS commander toying with a peasant farmer suspected of harbouring a missing Jewish family. Tarantino prolongs the agony with chilling bilingual verbiage, revealing key information at crucial points before finally letting loose with a casual burst of violence that's all the more disturbing for the tension-breaking relief it brings.

This sequence serves as a brilliant introduction to the film's chief villain, the loquacious Colonel Hans Landa, played with astonishing verve, charisma and multilingual dexterity by Christoph Waltz, an Austrian-born television actor who deservedly won the Best Actor award at this year's Cannes film festival. Nicknamed "the Jew Hunter", Landa's actions have made him one of the most feared Nazis in occupied France. They've also altered the life of the film's heroine, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mlanie Laurent), a beautiful young Jewish woman whose family is the one he slaughters at that farmhouse. Resurfacing three years later as the proprietress of an art deco cinema in occupied Paris, her thoughts turn to revenge when her picture palace is chosen to host the Hitler- attended premiere of a new propaganda film produced by Joseph Goebbels.

She's not the only one plotting to take out the Nazi top brass. As Mike Myers's cut glass-accented English general reveals, the Allies also have a plan to blow up the cinema, an elaborate plot involving a stiff-upper-lipped film critic turned commando (Michael Fassbinder), a German movie star turned Allied spy (Diane Kruger) and the titular Basterds, a band of vicious Jewish-American Nazi hunters with a penchant for scalp collecting.

Led by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pit), a part-Apache, jaw-jutting Tennessee hillbilly whose idea of entertainment is to watch his second in command cave in Nazi skulls with a baseball bat, he likes to brand survivors with a swastika on their foreheads as a permanent reminder of the atrocities they've committed.

Pitt plays Raine with the kind of goofiness favoured by George Clooney when he's trying to channel Clark Gable for comedic purposes. The result is an amusing aberration, a distorted image of how a righteous hero in a Second World War movie should look. Which is appropriate, since, in this parallel world, his just cause is fuelled by a sadistic eye-for-an-eye philosophy that has bent him out of shape.

Interestingly, the Basterds don't feature all that much. Tarantino prefers to create an air of mystique around them, limiting their screen time until circumstances dictate their centrality to the plot becomes more prominent. Similarly, the violence is brief, bold and brutal, and while a lot of time could be spent fretting over questions of morality and taste arising from the appropriation of the Second World War and the Holocaust for the purposes of entertainment, I'd rather watch Tarantino's take on such things than the worthy faux-sincerity of Oscar-chasing swill such as The Reader or Jewish resistance movie Defiance.

Tarantino at least understands the power of cinema and is well versed in its history. For Goebbels' propaganda film – snatches of which are seen in the thrilling finale – he deliberately appropriates the visceral visual style of Gillo Pontecorvo's famously even-handed docu-drama The Battle of Algiers, as if to say, "Look how easily images can be distorted to serve a political end". Yes, there's depth here if you want it. There's also artistic boldness. Tarantino's insistence that characters mostly speak in their native tongues ensures that more than half the dialogue is subtitled, which not only eliminates the need for Euro-pudding accents and incongruous Valkyrie-style Hollywood ones, but actually adds an extra international dimension to Tarantino's trademark verbal riffing.

Of course, some will doubtless still sniff that at two and a half hours, it's too long and too leisurely paced, but so were Leone's films. Tarantino finds value in the kind of longueur that most modern film-makers excise, filling them with the kind of character details and idiosyncrasies (his foot fetish gets another work through in a deadly spin on Cinderella) that makes his films crazy, weird and distinctive. Nobody but Tarantino could have made Inglourious Basterds and, in a homogenising culture such as Hollywood, that's worth celebrating.