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Inglourious Basterds
The trailers and television advertisements for Inglourious Basterds, the new film by Quentin Tarantino, promise an intense World War II combat film in the vein of generic outings from the 1960’s and 70’s, most overtly The Dirty Dozen. While the film does deliver shockingly violent sequences and self-conscious stylistic excesses that audiences have come to expect from Tarantino, it vastly deviates from the conventional combat narrative. Inglourious Basterds is longer, quieter, more seductive, and certainly more surprising than anyone living outside of Tarantino’s brain could expect.
Broken into chapters, Inglourious Basterds tells a tripartite story of “once upon a time…in occupied France.” The plot lines mingle over several years and through many layers of historical and cinematic reality. The film begins with a long, tense, conversational prologue, which ends in the first meeting of SS officer Col. Hans Landa, played with extraordinary verve by Christoph Waltz, and the young Jewish woman, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent). Some years later we are introduced to the Basterds, a combat unit of Jewish-American soldiers led by Lt. Aldo Raine, played with comic grace by Brad Pitt, who are dropped into occupied territory before D-Day, their mission to slaughter Nazi soldiers and needle German morale. Reintroduced to Shosanna, we find she has changed her name and now runs a cinema in Paris. Inadvertently, she captures the affections of Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), a polite but persistent Nazi war hero, who arranges for the Nazi film, Nation's Pride, to premiere at her theater. Suffice it to say that the Basterds end up at the premiere and that Col. Hans Landa keeps himself villainously involved.
Appropriate to the film’s generic position, Tarantino takes formal influence from a range of films beyond the cycle of post war combat narratives. Notably, Tarantino takes cues from the wartime films of German expatriate directors, in particular Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die and Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be, as well as from Spaghetti Westerns, the 1980’s Action Film, and even from the propaganda machine and filmmaking impulse from within the Third Reich itself. With Inglourious Basterds he is for the first time delving into a complete historical setting. Much of the contemporary Tarantino survives, however, including his love of conversation. As a writer, Tarantino has always been extremely wordy, and yet, to his credit, he has discovered that conversation with a Nazi is something profoundly different. Tarantino has always been interested in control through conversation, and here, simply because of the uniforms around the table, every conversation has a suspenseful immediacy. With the exception of Brad Pitt’s Lt. Aldo Raine, the most gregarious and pryingly chatty characters are the Nazis. They wield power through words and use their confidence in speaking freely in multiple languages (they may be Nazis, but they’re still European) to influence and investigate. The most charismatic and fascinating of these Nazis is Col. Hans Landa, a man so deviously clever that it is impossible not to feel a grotesque admiration for him. Christoph Waltz, who won Best Actor at Cannes for the role, should expect some major consideration come awards season.
Shot by Robert Richardson, a veteran of Tarantino, Oliver Stone, and Martin Scorsese, the film has a gorgeously rich and classical palette. Photographed in anamorphic widescreen on Kodak film, and printed on Fuji film, the images are exceedingly versatile with a warmth that manages to leave room for brightly saturated colors. Richardson’s consistently classical and adapting cinematography allows for Tarantino to segue comfortably between genres, and aids the audience in accepting the leaps into complete fantasy. As the scenario eventually comes to disregard any shred of historical plausibility, it becomes apparent that Tarantino’s aim is neither to make a serious WWII film, nor to inject the WWII film with glorified schlock. Instead, Inglourious Basterds is a fascinating play on the tendency of cinematic icons and fantasies to overtake factual history. Tarantino throws his faith in the power of cinematic expression, as both propaganda and meditation, to remind the viewer that the icons and fantasies that have obliterated the need for the historical facts of WWII are taken directly from the cinematic instincts of the architects of the war. The ideological conflict was expressed in cinematic terms from the very beginning with the American Why We Fight series, and the misadventures of Warner Bros. animated Pvt. Snafu placed in opposition to the iconographic films of Leni Riefenstahl, and the visual propaganda achievements of Joseph Goebbels. After the war ended the visual language of the conflict remained, and it has been mined by Hollywood for generations. As he is a complete consumer of cinema, it is no surprise that the purpose of Tarantino’s engagement with the WWII film is not to draw a contemporary analogy, or to fulfill a generic need, but to revive and re-amalgamate the entire cinema born from both within and in response to the war. Therefore, it is more than a necessity that the silver nitrate celluloid plays an active role in the climax of Inglourious Basterds; it is, for Tarantino, a celebration.
Thaddeus Ruzicka
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