Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
“I believe this may just be my masterpiece,” declares ruthless Nazi-hunter Lt Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) as he brands another victim at the close of Inglourious Basterds. It sounds like Tarantino cheekily reviewing his own film – and for much of the proceedings it’s tempting to agree with him.
Witness for example the superb opening sequence: in occupied France in 1941, Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), the notorious ‘Jew Hunter’ of the Waffen-SS, interrogates a French dairy farmer who is hiding a Jewish family underneath his floorboards. It’s one of those pieces of protracted cat-and-mouse dialogue that Tarantino is famous for, and here he achieves a new mastery. He ratchets up near-unbearable levels of tension with some deliciously crisp writing, while imbuing the scene with genuine emotional depth.
From here the plot sets out on a familiar revenge trajectory: four years after witnessing the slaughter of her family by Landa, Jewish refugee Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent) attracts the unwelcome romantic attentions of German war hero Fredrick Zoller. When Zoller arranges an illustrious film premiere at the cinema she now runs, Dreyfus seizes her chance to wipe out the top brass of the Nazi high command – perhaps even, it is rumoured, the Fuhrer himself.
The premiere also attracts the attention of the eponymous Basterds, a group of Nazi-scalping Jewish-American guerrilla soldiers led by Raine, who team up with British agent Lt Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) and undercover German screen diva Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger). As plans are hatched to infiltrate the screening. multiple suicidal plot threads interweave, converging at the film’s close in an inevitable orgy of destruction. It’s like a coked-up, alternative-reality Valkyrie, blessedly freed from fidelity to fact or the observance of good taste or proportion.
The film’s second great set piece is a scene in the basement of a French tavern. It’s the familiar Great Escape-style scenario involving Allies in German uniforms fluffing their accents, but characteristically, Tarantino engages the patrons in a pop culture guessing game. As the protagonists down pale ales with the names of movie stars plastered to their foreheads, the scene riffs off themes of roleplay and double-bluff, building with terrible inevitability to one of Tarantino’s trademark Mexican stand offs. Once again, its cracklingly intense – the direction razor-sharp, the dialogue pitch perfect.
Inglourious Basterds is all about catharsis. Nostalgic for a world of long-lost moral certainties, the film revels in the opportunities for guilt-free Nazi blood-letting. But it’s for crimes against cinema, as much as those against humanity, that Tarantino’s Nazis have to pay. Casting a Jewish film buff and her black projectionist lover as agents of corrective vengeance, the movie becomes an act of revenge for the perversion of Tarantino’s beloved art form by Goebbels’ propaganda machine. Inglourious Basterds is a celebration of cinema as the liberating vehicle of democratic energies, and its plot revolves around the – literally – explosive possibilities of the medium.
Where Basterds triumphs is in the perfect balance it strikes between its pastiche elements and old-fashioned virtues like gripping storytelling and characterisation. The Basterds themselves are wonderfully drawn and gloriously cast, a rat pack of lantern-jawed, likeable psychos straight out of the pages of a Sven Hassel paperback. Every one of the principal actors does a fine job, but it’s Austrian Christoph Waltz in his first American film who steals the thing, delivering as SS chief Hans Lander an absolutely mesmerising performance that drips with a camp, skincrawling menace.
Then, two thirds of the way in, Tarantino comes close to ruining it all. He suddenly feels it necessary to pile on the high farce, tilting the film toward the tiresome genre-parody of other recent outings like Death Proof. The more he does this, the less you care.
Yet despite Tarantino’s best efforts to sabotage it, Basterds survives by dint of the sheer kinetic force of its deranged denoument. At this stage in his career, Tarantino finally has the finesse to surpass the pulp source material he’s imitating. In places, both the direction and the writing are worthy of the Cohen brothers at their best. Indulge its considerable weaknesses, and there’ some scintillating film-making here with a wit and energy few can touch.
