Inglourious Basterds
“Once upon a time… in Nazi occupied France” says the movie in its opening sequence. The start of a fairy tale demolished by the monstrous reality of the Second World War. The soundtrack is an aborted rendition of Fur Elise ringing out the distorted promises of history. In the fascist countryside Hans Landa, SS officer par excellence, interrogates a Jewish sympathizer cleverly demonstrating the sharp minds that brought genocide home to roost in 20th century Europe.
Inglourious Basterds is a war movie about war as farce, history as myth, politics as performance. Director/writer Quentin Tarantino plays with historical fact while clearly imbibing Shakespeare’s old adage “All the world’s a stage and all men and women, merely players”. And what actors they are! Landa (Christoph Waltz), perhaps one of the most cryptic and complex characters ever written on screen embodies the doctrine of Aryan supremacy, the ruthlessness and meticulous attention to detail that characterized the Reich. Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) is a part Native American soldier who takes a team of Jewish- American soldiers (including Eli Roth and BJ Novak) to Nazi occupied France with one aim in mind, “killin’ Gnatzis”.
The team homes in on a movie theater run by Shoshanna, a Jewish girl Landa leaves alive in the first scene of the film. Goebbels, Reichminister for Propaganda, has made a film based on the exploits of a brave German soldier and it is to be screened in this theater. The brave German soldier also plays himself in this film and is in attendance. Swastika’s dangle in the foyer, the color red dominates. It is symbolic of the Reichstag and Shoshanna has a plan to avenge the Jewish people and her own dead family. She will burn down the theater and incinerate the Fuhrer himself.
Adolf Hitler appears in the film as comic relief. The gravity that history bequeaths on Hitler is stripped away by Tarantino, who sees in him a poor version of Chaplin, an insecure soldier in a fancy uniform obsessed with staging his reality on screen and in the public domain than really forging it.
Perhaps it is here that we glimpse Tarantino’s arrogance. Not only does he unwittingly make light of the Nazis, but he somehow likens them to movie-monsters who can be bludgeoned to death by a baseball bat (wielded by Roth, who by far is more entertaining on camera than behind it.. :D). Obviously Tarantino has little patience for historical fact and in a weird way that’s strangely refreshing. On the other hand, he makes all his characters, however commonplace their origins may be, spew facts and informed details about cinema! He pays tribute to Pabst, Jannings, and other cinema greats. I am not too sure why he does this apart from obviously revealing that he knows a lot about cinema. It is jarring to see common soldiers comment on the finer points of movie-making but at the same time Tarantino seems to be instructing the movie-goers in the audience about cinematic history. Perhaps we are an ill-informed audience. This Cinema 101 course is not unwelcome, save that it veers away from the storyline, where the plot to bring down the Reich is overdetermined as Shoshanna and the Basterds are all planning exactly the same thing.
What interested me most about the movie (as usual) is Tarantino’s treatment of morality and ethics. Unlike many other movies about the Holocaust, Tarantino does not leave us very sure if the Basterds are any better than the Nazi’s they are hunting. It is this ambiguity that intrigued me most. Tarantino seems to be valorizing the Basterds for their primitive manner of killing – bludgeoning and scalping, branding their victims. In his version of war there are no rules and no heroes. He has always been a blood-thirsty director pushing his characters to embracing an excess of violence prompted by a desire for vengeance in extenuating circumstances.
The cinema is burned by setting old movie reels afire. As the Nazi’s perish in the fire Shoshanna’s face appears in the smoke laughing demonically and condemning them. She embraces the Jewish stereotype the Nazis have created and also tells them they can burn in hell. This fire is also symbolic of the burning of the Reichstag 1933.
Everyone in the movie is somehow connected to cinema. There is the former British film critic turned spy, Lt. Archie Hicox, Shoshanna (owns a theater), a German movie-actress turned anti-Nazi (played by Diane Kruger, who is infinitely more at ease acting in her own language. I remember her as ‘comic relief’ from the movie Troy where the audience laughed every time she came on screen as Helen of Troy). There is also the soldier turned actor and propaganda minister turned film director.
Inglourious Basterds is hugely entertaining despite the trademark Tarantino arrogance that creeps into the film. Somehow, Tarantino cannot let cinema remain cinema without adjusting the script to elevate his otherwise mediocre storyline to the level of cinema posing as art. And it works. Tarantino’s storylines are never mind-blowing. But his treatment of the storyline and the characters is. He sees his characters as actors in reel-life. They have to be fake enough, stereotypical enough and absurd enough to never be connected to anything real. And by constantly reminding us that this is nothing real, even though it appears to be; by telling us that his real-life actors are also reel-life actors in the story pretending to imitate what is real, he achieves cinematic distance from the world and removes himself from eons of cinema obsessed with portraying reality. I have constantly held that Tarantino does not care about the script or the plot, he cares about the finer points of movie-making. He is indulgent, obsessive (think about Death Proof and the dogged car chase for over 40 minutes) and at some point he lives for the technique and cinematic experimentation and does not really bother with things like tying up loose ends. This is why we never find out what happens to the German farmer from the first scene. And when tying up loose ends seems bothersome, Tarantino is quick to kill off his characters (like the pub shootout), making one question why so much time is spent on building up characters only to have them killed a few minutes later.
Special mention also needs to be made about Christoph Waltz’s performance that won him Best Actor at Cannes this year. An oldish Austrian actor who never won sufficient praise for his performances, Waltz’s portrayal of Hans Landa, SS Officer dominated the film entirely. Tarantino was dismayed when he couldn’t find the right actor to play Landa. He felt he had written an ‘unplayable’ part. And then Christoph Waltz-ed in.
My favorite part of the movie is hearing Brad Pitt play the uncomfortable and supremely annoyed American-pretending-to-be-Italian at the upscale event. He makes no effort to disguise his accent to pass off as Italian. It’s like he’s doing the Italians a favor by even trying to speak Italian. Lovely!!
Conclusion: Basterdized history is hugely entertaining.
My Rating: 3 and a half noddies!
Inglourious Basterds is a war movie about war as farce, history as myth, politics as performance. Director/writer Quentin Tarantino plays with historical fact while clearly imbibing Shakespeare’s old adage “All the world’s a stage and all men and women, merely players”. And what actors they are! Landa (Christoph Waltz), perhaps one of the most cryptic and complex characters ever written on screen embodies the doctrine of Aryan supremacy, the ruthlessness and meticulous attention to detail that characterized the Reich. Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) is a part Native American soldier who takes a team of Jewish- American soldiers (including Eli Roth and BJ Novak) to Nazi occupied France with one aim in mind, “killin’ Gnatzis”.
The team homes in on a movie theater run by Shoshanna, a Jewish girl Landa leaves alive in the first scene of the film. Goebbels, Reichminister for Propaganda, has made a film based on the exploits of a brave German soldier and it is to be screened in this theater. The brave German soldier also plays himself in this film and is in attendance. Swastika’s dangle in the foyer, the color red dominates. It is symbolic of the Reichstag and Shoshanna has a plan to avenge the Jewish people and her own dead family. She will burn down the theater and incinerate the Fuhrer himself.
Adolf Hitler appears in the film as comic relief. The gravity that history bequeaths on Hitler is stripped away by Tarantino, who sees in him a poor version of Chaplin, an insecure soldier in a fancy uniform obsessed with staging his reality on screen and in the public domain than really forging it.
Perhaps it is here that we glimpse Tarantino’s arrogance. Not only does he unwittingly make light of the Nazis, but he somehow likens them to movie-monsters who can be bludgeoned to death by a baseball bat (wielded by Roth, who by far is more entertaining on camera than behind it.. :D). Obviously Tarantino has little patience for historical fact and in a weird way that’s strangely refreshing. On the other hand, he makes all his characters, however commonplace their origins may be, spew facts and informed details about cinema! He pays tribute to Pabst, Jannings, and other cinema greats. I am not too sure why he does this apart from obviously revealing that he knows a lot about cinema. It is jarring to see common soldiers comment on the finer points of movie-making but at the same time Tarantino seems to be instructing the movie-goers in the audience about cinematic history. Perhaps we are an ill-informed audience. This Cinema 101 course is not unwelcome, save that it veers away from the storyline, where the plot to bring down the Reich is overdetermined as Shoshanna and the Basterds are all planning exactly the same thing.
What interested me most about the movie (as usual) is Tarantino’s treatment of morality and ethics. Unlike many other movies about the Holocaust, Tarantino does not leave us very sure if the Basterds are any better than the Nazi’s they are hunting. It is this ambiguity that intrigued me most. Tarantino seems to be valorizing the Basterds for their primitive manner of killing – bludgeoning and scalping, branding their victims. In his version of war there are no rules and no heroes. He has always been a blood-thirsty director pushing his characters to embracing an excess of violence prompted by a desire for vengeance in extenuating circumstances.
The cinema is burned by setting old movie reels afire. As the Nazi’s perish in the fire Shoshanna’s face appears in the smoke laughing demonically and condemning them. She embraces the Jewish stereotype the Nazis have created and also tells them they can burn in hell. This fire is also symbolic of the burning of the Reichstag 1933.
Everyone in the movie is somehow connected to cinema. There is the former British film critic turned spy, Lt. Archie Hicox, Shoshanna (owns a theater), a German movie-actress turned anti-Nazi (played by Diane Kruger, who is infinitely more at ease acting in her own language. I remember her as ‘comic relief’ from the movie Troy where the audience laughed every time she came on screen as Helen of Troy). There is also the soldier turned actor and propaganda minister turned film director.
Inglourious Basterds is hugely entertaining despite the trademark Tarantino arrogance that creeps into the film. Somehow, Tarantino cannot let cinema remain cinema without adjusting the script to elevate his otherwise mediocre storyline to the level of cinema posing as art. And it works. Tarantino’s storylines are never mind-blowing. But his treatment of the storyline and the characters is. He sees his characters as actors in reel-life. They have to be fake enough, stereotypical enough and absurd enough to never be connected to anything real. And by constantly reminding us that this is nothing real, even though it appears to be; by telling us that his real-life actors are also reel-life actors in the story pretending to imitate what is real, he achieves cinematic distance from the world and removes himself from eons of cinema obsessed with portraying reality. I have constantly held that Tarantino does not care about the script or the plot, he cares about the finer points of movie-making. He is indulgent, obsessive (think about Death Proof and the dogged car chase for over 40 minutes) and at some point he lives for the technique and cinematic experimentation and does not really bother with things like tying up loose ends. This is why we never find out what happens to the German farmer from the first scene. And when tying up loose ends seems bothersome, Tarantino is quick to kill off his characters (like the pub shootout), making one question why so much time is spent on building up characters only to have them killed a few minutes later.
Special mention also needs to be made about Christoph Waltz’s performance that won him Best Actor at Cannes this year. An oldish Austrian actor who never won sufficient praise for his performances, Waltz’s portrayal of Hans Landa, SS Officer dominated the film entirely. Tarantino was dismayed when he couldn’t find the right actor to play Landa. He felt he had written an ‘unplayable’ part. And then Christoph Waltz-ed in.
My favorite part of the movie is hearing Brad Pitt play the uncomfortable and supremely annoyed American-pretending-to-be-Italian at the upscale event. He makes no effort to disguise his accent to pass off as Italian. It’s like he’s doing the Italians a favor by even trying to speak Italian. Lovely!!
Conclusion: Basterdized history is hugely entertaining.
My Rating: 3 and a half noddies!
posted by Vasundhara at 4:50 PM
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