Everything is cinema: "Inglourious Basterds"

Jacky Ido and Melanie Laurent contemplate where the axe ought to fall in Basterds

I can't think of a single contemporary filmmaker who brings out the scolding third-grade teacher in so many cinephiles more than Quentin Tarantino. Get thee to just about any film-enthusiast message board, or any comments thread to a post about Tarantino on any film blog, and you'll see any number of what we might call "Work Habits And Character" complaints, which all boil down to something like "While Quentin is a bright, clever, and sometimes resourceful student, he needs to focus more on the 'real world' and less on his own personal obsessions if he ever hopes to amount to something." Put another way: Quentin Tarantino could be a genuinely great filmmaker if only he could get over his puerile, annoying insistence on making Quentin Tarantino movies. 

 

And so. Inglourious Basterds, which is a loud, proud, unabashed Quentin Tarantino movie that will not satisfy the scolders in any way, shape, or form. And which I found one of the most balls-out insane, and insanely exhilarating, films that I've seen in many a year, and cannot wait to see again, maybe three or four more times before it hits DVD. 

 

More than multi-leveled pop-culture references and cross-hierarchical cinephilic fervor, the Tarantino project has always been, at heart, about wish-fulfillment, largely of a fairly adolescent variety. Note one of the central hooks of Tarantino's screenplay True Romance, filmed by Tony Scott in 1993: that a guy who works in a comic-book store can win the unconditional love and fierce devotion of a smoking-hot hooker in just one night. (Tarantino's former associate Roger Avary took that highly improbably notion and ran even further with it for his 1994 picture Killing Zoe.) The other pictures Tarantino's directed have almost all been about, among other things, different construction of cool, and all the completely cool shit that his cool people can do because he's pulling their strings. Even his most putatively mature film, 1997's Jackie Brown, is largely about Quentin Tarantino getting to do some really cool fantasy shit—he's adapting a novel by Elmore Leonard, and casting not only Pam Grier and Robert Forster but also Robert Fucking DeNiro in it, and how many movie geeks have ever conjured up the mojo to do something like that, punk? 

 

With Basterds we have Tarantino doing wish-fulfillment on a world-historical stage—rewriting the end of World War II. This takes the kind of chutzpah, both conceptual and logistical, that only a past master of grindhouse cinema could muster. In almost anybody else's hands the outrageousness of the various scenarios enacted in this epic would be an insult to history, but here they're not, because although the stage of this film might be world historical, Inglourious Basterds is finally not about history, or reality, or any such thing but about movies, which is all that any of Tarantino's movies have ever been about. 

 

And it is, for all that, or maybe because of all that, a picture that is sometimes genuinely and breathtakingly moving. The care with which Tarantino sets up his imagined world, a world fraught with pain and excruciating tension but dotted with edenic moments—I was particularly taken with a single shot of Melanie Laurent sitting in a bistro, wearing a very chic beret, elegantly smoking a cigarette and reading a French translation of  Leslie Charteris' The Saint In New York—gives off a burnished glow in every frame. And throughout,Tarantino revels in his major inheritance from Godard, which is, simply, an audacious freedom. The freedom to do twenty-minute set pieces in which characters sit at a barroom table and appear to do pretty much nothing to advance the plot, but in reality up the ante of tension and empathy with every line and exchanged glance. The freedom to toggle, within seconds, between searing, indignant pulp earnestness, and barn-door-broad burlesque schtick that might even have given Airplane!-era Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker pause, and keep doing it over and over, as he does in the film's final "chapter." The freedom to concoct a story wherein cinema's existence ...and destruction...save civilization. And more. 

 

The film is not perfect. While I'm not an Eli Roth hater in principle, I do remain perplexed at Tarantino's conviction that the young filmmaker is somehow a compelling screen presence. However, any complaints anybody has aired about Brad Pitt's performance ought not be taken at all seriously—he's a scream. Christoph Waltz, as Pitt's opposite number, IS all that and a bag of chips, but really, the whole damn cast is pretty awe-inspiring—yeah, even Mike Fucking Myers. And even Diane Kruger. But Mélanie Laurent made the biggest impression on me, for reasons we can discuss after a few more of you see the film. Which I obviously recommend you do. 

Comments

[D Cairns]

Haven't the Basterds already sunk to that level? As Newsweek pointed out, most of what they do to their enemies was in reality done by nazis to Jews.

I couldn't enjoy the film because it seemed to be inviting me to participate in something horrible, and the complicating factors seemed like afterthoughts, so they did not make it seem thought-provoking either. Like a repulsive entertainment was dreamed up, and then a few contradictions peppered over it to make it seem deep.

Have seen a couple of comments in various places saying that the Bowie song plays over the cinema inferno, but in the version I saw it only played when Shosanna was getting dolled up for the premier.

[Tom Carson]

"While Tarantino may want to fuck with the catharsis, he doesn't want to ruin it completely." That's absolutely true, and could reduce the whole thing to Quentin wanting to eat his cake and have it too. God, is there no end to fathoming what this movie is *really* about? But for GK's sake, I hope I'm not alone in enjoying the multiple debates it's provoked. Sue me for returning to this thread the way William S. Burroughs might keep coming back to a good source of heroin.

[Allen Belz]

I'd say it has less to do with having his Kate and Edith too than it does with those quite clearly stated words that both you and MS quoted. Of course, I'm continuing to go on about this topic while still not having seen the film (tomorrow morning, 11am PST). I'd agree that there's probably no end to the fathoming...he said back in the Pulp Fiction days that he definitely wants his movies to mean far more than one thing.

bill, as to acknowledging the possible operatic charge it might give some, just a quick scan of the comments seems to tell me you're not exactly alone there...even Glenn says the ending is "ROUSING [my caps] AND unsettling."

My personal disinclination to lizard-brain vengeance kinda stuff has, I'm sure a certain amount to do with two figures from my past...my dad, who had a hair-trigger temper and who nursed grudges like they were best friends. The war story character he most reminded me of was the fella in "Slaughterhouse Five" who was putting every slight on his list. Though he and I are more cordial these days, it's still a very distant relationship. The other was an older guy who'd been WWII, came back with some hair-raising stories, and whose favorite quote was from that famed wuss and finger-wagger Ernest Hemingway: "Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime." Not that he thought that he or any of the people he served with were criminals, more that it was a crime that it ever had to happen at all. And he got no kind of "manly" primal satisfaction out of what he did in the slightest. It's some of this latter knowledge I'm in the midst of passing along to my own kid, if he wants it. He'll be going into the Navy, very much by his own choice, at the end of the year.

[Allen Belz]

Apologies for slight typos and word/punctuation omissions here and there in the above...it's late. Also if it appears at all in the last sentence that I'm in conflict with my kid regarding his path...it wouldn't be my path, and of course I'm concerned over what could happen to him, but I'm fully respectful of his choice.

[Marcos]

As a Jew, I came into this move with mixed feelings. On the one hand, obviously, I love the idea of the Nazis getting their comeuppance. On the other, I do think there are some troubling images portrayed here. The Jews in the movie aren't even characters -- just unsympathetic, brutish, murderers. I actually found it anti-Jewish in some ways. Another friend forwarded this review -- from a NAZI site --

http://www.toqonline.com/2009/08/inglourious-basterds/

that actually summarized what I had been feeling. It made me sick, but I think there's something to it here -- that Tarantino is making a joke out of things that should be serious.

[Andrew Wyatt]

One thing that I haven't seen discussed much to date is IG's role as a kind of "Last WWII Film" that deliberately strives to be a fed-up period at the end of a particular setence: the use of Nazis in pop entertainment. Amid all the revenge fantasy giddiness, I definitely detected a deeply cynical current in the film that questions the endurance of WWII, the Nazis, and Adolf Hitler specifically as disposable elements in fiction. [SPOILERS] When Donnie sprays Hitler with his machine gun, literally disintegrating the man in a hail of bullets, I felt as much contempt for Hitler-as-Symbol as Hitler-as-Man. QT seemed to be saying "Okay, I've destroyed Hitler. He's been turned into bloody hamburger and burned to ashes. Can we please, please, please, please move on?"

[Mike D]

Bill, I'm with you on this 100%. I enjoyed, nay, relished the massacre and indeed any action against the Nazis in the film, without scruples. In a film meant to be so cathartic and over-the-top, I find it ludicrous to harbor any ethical qualms. The film was fun, and my bleeding heart enjoyed every jest, and every bludgeoning, scalping, shooting and assorted atrocity thrown at the National Socialists. Especially Landa's grand comeuppance. Those who would compare a film that clearly has more in common with spaghetti westerns than recorded history, those folks need to lighten up. Seriously. I was with Aldo, Donny and the Basterds the whole way. And, damn, is Fassbender cool. This film lived up to all the expectations I had over the last ten years, and then some. Move over, Chigurh, here comes Landa. Damn, what a movie. Cannot wait to see it again. Stiglitz is badass!

[John Keefer]

Have I told you lately that I love you?

-Keefer
51deep.com

[Weepingorilla]

I guess at this point That Fuzzy Bastard has "lost" the argument (imagine someone judging a movie by it's trailer - shocking!), but for what it's worth, I HAVE seen the movie and I think he's dead on concerning the 2 scenes that make up most of the trailer. That's not torture, guys? Oooookay.