By, Jonathan Foreman
4 min read
ByJonathan Foreman, Jonathan Foreman
Each of the Basterds is required to collect a minimum of 100 Nazi scalps by Pitt’s commander (Tarantino lovingly depicts the scalping process) and soon enough they have indeed wrought terror all over occupied Europe. Hitler himself becomes obsessed with their deadly exploits — this film really belongs to the genre of “alternate history” — and eventually they have an encounter with the Fuhrer that might bring the war to an end.
The audience is obviously supposed to identify with this mostly Jewish guerilla unit. But there is something about the idea of inspiring holy terror by mutilation, decapitations etc that inevitably evokes today’s real life masters of cruelty and demoralisation by atrocity, Al Qaeda. Presumably this is not deliberate: it may well be that Tarantino neither reads the papers nor watches the news.
Nevertheless, despite the title, some two thirds of the film does not focus on the Basterds. Indeed they are on screen so little that, besides Pitt’s lieutenant, they remain barely distinguishable dark haired youths until the very end.
Instead, the film spends much more time with other characters like Shoshanna (Melanie Laurant), the Jewish girl in hiding who is planning a spectacular act of resistance together with her black French lover; the SS Colonel Hans Landa, nicknamed “the Jew Hunter” brilliantly played by Christoph Waltz; and Diane Kruger’s Bridget von Hammersmark, the German actress working in the resistance. (Kruger who was so bland in Troy is a revelation here).
The film is generally rather confused about Nazis and Germans. The Inglourious Basterd team happily assumes that all Germans in uniform are Nazis. (The Basterds take no prisoners, instead gunning down disarmed captives in another creepy echo of the Nazis themselves.)
But on the other hand they recruit to their number a German soldier who has killed many Nazi officers. It isn’t clear if he has murdered them because he is a psychopathic serial killer or if he opposes the Third Reich. Diane Kruger’s von Hammersmark, on the other hand, is a German working secretly for the Allies.
While it is refreshing to find a movie that deals with the Holocaust but for once is not centred on a good, anti-Nazi German, it also feels as if Tarantino simply cannot be bothered to deal with the whole Germans and Nazis question. For him, the war and the persecution of the Jews is mere background to be mined for jokes and film references and cool scenes. And the great thing about having Nazis as the bad guys is that it supposedly gives him and the audience an excuse to rejoice in mutilation, torture and other sadistic acts.
You could argue that it is healthy to treat the war in such a way. Many of the films that Tarantino is paying homage to were made within 30 years of the war and were much less devout and serious than recent epics like Saving Private Ryan.
Moreover there are some undeniable pleasures to be found in Inglourious Basterds. Among them is Tarantino’s joy in dialogue. The way he revels in long, darkly comic conversations marks him out as a kind of rebel traditionalist. He loves what he considers “cool stuff” in old movies, and that cool stuff is, refreshingly, not the pyrotechnic or computer generated effects that make so many recent summer blockbusters look and feel like computer games.
And even if he is a historical ignoramus, he is wonderfully literate in terms of the history of popular film. Inglorious Basterds includes a wealth of cinematic references in particular to obscure early 1970s exploitation films like the original Inglorious Bastards, but also to that genre of commando/sabotage films that began with The Guns of Navarone.
Starting with a terrific opening sequence in which a silky sinister Nazi officer tries to terrify a French farmer into giving up the Jews he is hiding, the film boasts several terrific, wonderfully tense cat and mouse conversations that will remind Tarantino fans of the best scenes in Pulp Fiction or True Romance.
Unfortunately the film tends to drag in between these set piece scenes. Its division into several chapters makes the plot feel like an excuse for what Tarantino wants to do: indulge his talent for cool scenes and brilliant dialogue.
It is perhaps a shame that Tarantino loves blood so much, just as he loves reproducing exaggerated sounds of metal cutting flesh or smashing bone. He loves these things in the way only someone with no personal experience of violence can love them.
Tarantino unquestionably possesses genius, one that is limited to a certain kind of filmmaking and which seems increasingly subject to his more peculiar fetishes. As well as his yen for sadistic violence, these fetishes famously include a fascination with female feet.
Inglourious Basterds not only includes a sequence in which a secret agent is identified by her footwear, Cinderella-style, it boasts what to Tarantino must be an exquisite scene in which we see a beautiful girl strangled, the camera holding fast to the sight of her elegant bare foot shuddering its last. For Jewish audiences the film might be disturbing in several ways. The fantasy of a ruthless Jewish-American vengeance squad parachuted into occupied France (on a mission very different to the real-life Palestinian Jewish paratroopers of the Hanna Senesh-Reuven Dafni unit dropped by the British into Yugoslavia) ought to be satisfying. But seeing it on screen somehow serves as an uncomfortable reminder of perceived Jewish passivity and weakness in the face of the Holocaust.
One thing that places Inglourious Basterds far from the Hollywood mainstream is its extensive use of foreign languages and English subtitles. For years it has been Hollywood orthodoxy that subtitles are box-office death. Tarantino is challenging that conventional wisdom and he may well succeed.