Inglourious Basterds.

Dir: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Christoph Waltz, Brad Pitt, Melanie Laurent, Michael Fassbender, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger.
2009, colour, 152 mins.


My oldest memory of Quentin Tarantino is probably seeing the cover for Reservoir Dogs in a Movieland video store when I was younger. I remember noticing that it was rated R and thinking it was super badarse but having no idea what it was about. Later on I'd find the Pulp Fiction soundtrack in the cd collection of the place where my Father was living at the time and I became obsessed with "Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon". I didn't know why, I just loved it. My first Tarantino film became Kill Bill Vol. 1 which my Father took me to see in 2003 even though I was 15 at the time and it was rated R. I felt super badarse. I then watched Vol. 2 when it came out the year after and in time my friend Ben showed me Pulp Fiction & Reservoir Dogs. Later, I was excited for Grindhouse, eagerly awaiting the projected release date of April 24, 2007. Suddenly, it disappeared from the release calendar and all promotional material vanished from the foyer of each cinema I visited. I was puzzled and annoyed until I discovered it had performed poorly at the US box office and so was being cut in half - removing half the experience in the process - and putting each film out seperately. While Planet Terror never materialized on Australian screens (except some cinemas including the Astor in Melbourne, who have taken to showing screenings of the complete double feature with trailers & fake advertisements often), I won a free pass to the Coburg drive-in to see Death Proof when it was finally released in September of that year. Couldn't have picked a better location to see it, but as a film it was a let down.

This was Quentin "Pulp Fiction" Tarantino. Despite the amazing car chase and the odd patch of quality dialogue it was too big of a departure and QT went down a notch in my books. Whisperings of Inglourious Basterds actually being made surfaced not long after Kill Bill had concluded (talk had begun many years before that of the script alone) but knowing his habit of teasing projects that never happen and considering the talk came mostly from the writer/director himself, I wasn't holding my breath. It became the holy grail of Tarantino scripts. The project many thought would never get made for a huge variety of reasons had rumours about its' details flying around left and right. At one stage it was planned as a long series of films because of the scope before it was pared down and finished mid-2008. It was rushed into production immediately to be ready in time for Cannes the following year (which happens in May). That time frame would have scared anyone but amazingly, they pulled it off and here I sit having already viewed it 3 times.

Pitt is Lt. Aldo Raine and he & his cohorts "The Basterds" are in France, killing Nazis. Their reason for being there doesn't extend much beyond that except later on being involved in Operation Kino, the key plot point of the film involving a plot to kill Hitler. Eli Roth is Sgt. Donnie Donowitz who has built his reputation as the "Bear Jew" and Til Schweiger is Hugo Stiglitz, both are Basterds. Laurent is Shoshanna Dreyfuss/Emmanuelle Mimieux; massacre survivor and cinema owner in Paris with an axe to grind. Fassbender is Lt. Archie Hicox, a British film critic turned spy for the army and key player in Operation Kino. Krueger plays a popular German actress by the name of Bridget von Hammersmark who is also a British spy and assists in Kino. Waltz is a detective for the SS/SD named Col. Hans Landa (nicknamed "The Jew Hunter") who's job is to basically track down Jews avoiding discovery in France. Oh, and he covers all four languages - French, Italian, English & German - spoken in the film.

This is a talkie in the best sense of the word. Tarantino is flexing his dialogue muscle here to the point of bursting and in terms of action-to-talking ratio in this film you're looking in Pulp Fiction territory. That's not all there is here but it's a good way of simplifying it. Being such a film lover tends toward the film also being outstanding technically; the colours are vibrant despite being appropriate for the period, the detail incredibly fine and I challenge you to find a poorly focused or framed shot in the whole darn thing. Surprisingly spared of much of his typical cinematographical (word?) flair Quentin here sticks mostly to solid master shots that usually pit characters in their respective combative corners according to the conversations being had...very Western. For example, in the already famous opening scene it's rare to find a shot that nestles the farmer Perrier LaPadite anywhere near Hans Landa though they are the only two people in the scene. Being pitched as his Western it's not unusual that QT has picked Leone as a stylistic reference (call it inspiration if you want) and it's written all over the production.

Waltz destroys every actor playing against him. He controls the film but not in a distracting or grandstanding way: his character is the largest and most interesting and he obviously keeps that in mind with every nuance he's injected into this performance. The conversations he has with other people almost always involve him spiralling down from seemingly inane yet charming banter into scalpel-like precision in extracting exactly what he needs which is usually a confession or admission of guilt. Everyone else is efficient - Fassbender and August Diehl are probably the biggest standouts of the other key players. Pitt, besides being the main marquee name doesn't have too much to do and behaves accordingly. He's fun. Krueger is probably the weakest, playing her character as if she was reading a script. I don't think she intended it to be taken that way but I suppose that's what happens when a performance is poor and you're an actress playing another actress. Perhaps she got confused and forgot to even bring the towel to throw in. Alright, so she's not that bad but she doesn't hold a torch to Laurent in terms of the feminine sector, who reacts more than acts but in the best way. Schweiger is a lot of fun and a nifty cameo from Mike Myers is pretty sweet. And what QT film is complete without Samuel L Jackson? As our sporadic narrator he doesn't say much but his voice still kills it every time.

As for the implications of the story...it's a tricky one. Some critics have called it Jewish Revenge Porn but I think that kind of misses the point. The film is almost entirely about revenge, that much is true but it's almost lighthearted while being quite heavyhanded. The story is never a joke despite spatterings of humour and never deadly serious as shown by the story itself which involves mostly fictional characters and turns of events which run contrary to what we all know happened around this period. The tone is never self important and you never feel like there's a deeper lesson to be learned. I personally didn't enjoy hearing laughter at one of the later more crucial scenes because I didn't think it was really anything to laugh at. It's hard to make a strong point about it in this review without giving away major plot movements though so forget I even mentioned it. Ha!

For some reason, you actually kinda believe all of it even though suspension of disbelief - especially in the face of recorded history of the kind dealt with here - happens rarely these days. It's a pleasure to walk out of a movie theatre with something to talk about as opposed to "That was crap", "That looked cool" or "That was awesome". It's films like this that force you to pin down exactly why you think any of those things about them and in my experience this film has encouraged a lot of discussion.

I'm very happy that Tarantino is back to his form. Maybe we won't have to wait so long next time, eh?


***1/2 out of ****