“Since 1997’s Jackie Brown, [Tarantino's] output has been underwhelming by comparison”  

When Christopher Marlowe died, having been stabbed in the eye in a bar fight (a gruesome piece of theatre that Quentin Tarantino would no doubt approve of), he had written no more than a handful of plays, yet these few works now form the bedrock of a significant literary reputation.  Similarly, Quentin Tarantino is one of the most well-known modern film directors, despite his unprolific nature.  The reasons for his ascent to the summit of cinematic celebrity are two; firstly, Reservoir Dogs, which was an incredibly fresh and dynamic take on the tired heist genre, and secondly Pulp Fiction, which is widely recognised as a bona fide modern classic.  However, since 1997’s Jackie Brown (still only his third feature), his output has been underwhelming by comparison.  Kill Bill, his previous effort, was full of his trademark stylised bloodshed, but lacked any great interplay between characters; the main revenge plot could have been drawn from the tragedy of Seneca, and was about as complex as the oeuvre of the ancient dramatist.  Happily, Inglourious Basterds is a welcome return to form.

The opening scene; a French dairy farmer goes about his work, and spies a convoy of vehicles approaching over the horizon.  He orders the womenfolk inside, and steels himself for a showdown.  The musical score merges snippets of Beethoven’s Für Elise with frantic flamenco guitar.  However, despite these apparently incongruous aural and visual stimuli, we as an audience are perfectly aware of what’s going on, because we have been informed that the year is 1941.  The jeeps all bear Nazi insignia, and about ten minutes in, we see a Jewish family hiding under the floorboards.  This, then, is the first of five episodes is Tarantino’s unashamedly idiosyncratic vision of the Second World War.

“Basterds continually subverts the clichés it plays upon, often to brilliant effect.”  

From the moment we see Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), we know who will triumph in the opening duel; he is ruthlessly efficient at his job, so much so that he has acquired the nickname “The Jewhunter”.  But the duel is merely verbal; Landa is a master of torture dressed up as alternately banal and penetrative conversation.  Eventually, the farmer cracks under the pressure, and the guns are turned on the Jews.  Although Basterds is split into five parts, it is not a sequence of shorts; as in Pulp Fiction, everything is related, and the tense, claustrophobic opening sequence informs the rest of the movie on two levels.  

“The campaign of the Basterds can be sympathised with..” 

Inglourious Basterds takes the form of a revenge fantasy, but it is more involving than Kill Bill (which concerned a personal score) because, even though the film’s historical accuracy is all but non-existent, the plot relates to a wider issue.  Macrocosmically, the family killed in the first scene represent all the Jews that died in the Holocaust, and this excuses a great deal of Tarantino’s characteristic violent excesses.  One half of the action involves a group of Jewish-American soldiers (the eponymous Basterds), led by Brad Pitt’s merciless Lieutenant Aldo Raine.  Their self-declared aim is to mount a guerrilla operation in France, and to scalp Nazis in the manner of Native Americans, and they do so with glee throughout their story arc (unfortunately, mainly when I was in the process of eating).  Their violence is brutal, but excusable considering Nazi atrocities, at least in Tarantino’s world, where force can only be repaid in kind.  While this part of the film treads a morally grey area, the campaign of the Basterds can be sympathised with in the end, because they are unquestionably on the side of good, and because certain of their members end up suffering for their cause.  Once again, a cliché is subverted – this time, one associated with war films.  The Americans do not enter the war as some sort of invincible liberating force, as in many po-faced and worthy WWII biopics; the Basterds only number about ten, giving them an underdog status that ties in with their Jewishness.  Tarantino is smart in that he absolves himself, at least in part, from any accusations of gratuity.  The Basterds display utilitarian ethics; they commit terrible acts, but for the greater good.  

For those who find it hard to fully engage with men who carve swastikas into the foreheads of their fellow men, or beat them pulpy with baseball bats, there is Shosanna Dreyfus, played with a curious mixture of icy restraint and occasional momentary overwroughtness by Mélanie Laurent.  She represents the flipside of the resistance; she is not a force acting on behalf of the chosen people, but a very human character – she is the only survivor of the opening massacre, and at the same time that the Basterds hatch a plot to blow up a cinema with the Nazi High Command inside, Shosanna plans to burn it down.  She is driven purely by revenge, but we know that her actions are also on behalf of the persecuted Jews.  It is telling that Tarantino has chosen to balance the intricate plan of the Basterds, which involves Allied generals, elaborate disguises and a beautiful German double agent-cum-actress (Diane Kruger) with Shosanna’s intensely personal desire to engulf Hitler, Goebbels et al. in a conflagration.  This is not just a simple revenge, but an act being planned at all levels; the protagonists are moving inexorably towards the same goal, and it is this unity of plot that ties together the different strands of the story, which would otherwise be scattered.  

“Brad Pitt turns in a good performance, but is completely outshone by Waltz as Corporal Landa” 

The picture continually delights with little touches fully in keeping with Tarantino’s idiosyncratic style.  A plot twist is accompanied by an abrupt change in camera angle; a dramatic part cuts out in the middle of a phrase in the musical score, jumping instantly to a more word section: Samuel L. Jackson (of both Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown) turns up to read a narration.  Basterds is also full of metacinematic touches, such as a switch from subtitled French to English mid-conversation, and Shosanna’s statement that film directors should always be respected.  Two major twists towards the end are genuinely shocking and it is moments like these that raise Inglourious Basterds above the average war movie; it feels like the creation of a man who wants every part to be right. 

 ”Mike Myers… perpetually looks as though he’s about to enter Austin Powers or Dr. Evil mode”  

That is not to say that the film is perfect.  Anybody expecting something as innovative as Pulp Fiction’s cyclical chronology, or as iconic as the ear-slicing scene in Reservoir Dogs will be disappointed, and the soundtrack is more Morricone pastiche than cult classic, as with Pulp Fiction.  In addition, the romance, or what there is of it, feels slightly contrived, but the picture’s main drawback is associated with the plan itself.  It starts to come to attention in the first scene with Hitler; Martin Wuttke plays him as a foaming maniac, a little to close to Charlie Chaplin’s inspired parody in The Great Dictator.  It would be unfair to call him cartoonish, considering the rest of the film, but it seems like there has been a missed opportunity to make the most evil man in history a more nuanced character, like Landa, rather than a caricature; perhaps a portrayal like that of Bruno Ganz in Downfall (still, for me, the ultimate screen Hitler) would have been more appropriate.  The same is true of the rest of the Nazi High Command; Goebbels is a camp deviant, and Bormann and Goering only appear very close to the end.  Therefore, the climax may be explosive, but it carries nothing like the emotional and dramatic weight that it could have done if those at the top of the Nazi hierarchy were shown as they really were, rather than impersonal targets.  Also, considering that this film does so much to expand and subvert clichés, the British characters (and I am aware that this is a common gripe with Limey film critics) are, like the Nazis, stereotyped.  Fassbender drinks scotch whilst making quips in an Etonian drawl, whilst Mike Myers, making a cameo as a top general, perpetually looks as though he’s about to enter Austin Powers or Dr. Evil mode.  Meanwhile, Winston Churchill smokes a cigar in the background, looking like he does in all his iconic images.  Most pertinently, a slow-motion death sequence, set to stirringly tragic music, is a bit too cheesy, and Tarantino should probably know better. 

But maybe it is just as he meant; considering how unusual his previous output has been, it is difficult to tell what is directorial sloppiness, and what is intentional subversion.  It is, at times, difficult what to make of Inglourious Basterds.  It is a film concerning the Nazis, in which Jewish characters commit the most appalling acts of violence.  It both embraces convention and the past, and turns these things on their heads.  It is a black comedy of horrific carnage.  Historical fact is thrown out of the window and left gasping in the road.  But the charm of Basterds is that it is utterly unique, and when a cinematic vision is executed with such panache, one cannot help but sit back and admire it.

George Twigg