Tarantino's minimalist maximalism

Christoph Waltz rocks the meerschaum in Basterds

I've always been a sucker for narrative artists who mess around, cleverly or joltingly or what have you, with the compression and expansion of time. I understand that his motivation was largely to do with a self-imposed deadline of 52 composing days, but I do love that Stendhal expended so much verbiage and so much elaborate description of hero Fabrizio del Dongo for most of the length of The Charterhouse of Parma, only to wrap up the story, which was intended to make up a whole second volume and which contains, among other things, the book's only explanation of the title, in five pages or so. What bloody brilliant nerve. Jacques Rivette employed a similar tactic in his 1965 film adaptation of Diderot's The Nun. The always modern D.W. Griffith divides Way Down East into two halves; the first half spans years, the second only a couple of days; both are of about equal length. Reading Nabokov's time games, and Borges', are like witnessing multiple rounds of three-dimensional chess.

In his latest film, Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino doesn't do anything quite so ingenious and/or supple as the radical shuffling of relative narrative time that was part of what made Pulp Fiction such a kick. What we've got here is more foursquare, linear. Still, his use of time in the context of what's supposed to be, on one level, a sweeping historical narrative, is pretty unusual. We may all recall the incredible waiting-at-the-station opening of Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In The West. Watching Inglourious Basterds, one often gets a sense that Tarantino wanted to make a film that was made up entirely of such powerful, discrete units, and nothing else. He doesn't quite do it here. But he comes close. 

What follows is a structural breakdown of the picture based on my second viewing of it yesterday. I've tried to keep it as spoiler free as possible. I think that just by grasping the outline without its particulars, you'll be able to put together how formally unusual the film is.

As has been the case with most of Tarantino's feature films, Basterds is divided into chapters. The first, "Once Upon A Time...In Nazi-Occupied Germany France,"  [Yeah duh—Ed.]takes place in 1941. Obviously it's an overt homage to Leone, specifically, as I see it, to the Sweetwater siege overseen by Henry Fonda's Frank in Once Upon A Time In The West. As in that scene, this scene introduces the film's principal villain, Nazi Colonel Landa (Christoph Waltz). It introduces another important character, I won't say who. It's a straightforward single scene playing out in real time and lasts about 20 minutes.

Chapter Two is "Inglourious Basterds," introducing the Nazi-scalping squad of eight Jewish soldiers led by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt). It contains two scenes, sort of. The first is straightforward enough, comprising Raine's pep-talk to his squad, which I recall was part of an early teaser trailer for the film. The second scene's a little trickier. It begins with Hitler having a fit whilst in the middle of posing for a portrait, and then interrogating a young soldier who's survived an encounter with the Basterds. A scene-within-a-scene showing the Basterds methods (this is the bit that inspired Jeffrey Wells to complain that the film doesn't show sufficient deference to its brave, stoic Nazi characters) follows, but THAT scene is interrupted by an interpolation telling what you might call the "origin story" of one of the Basterds. We're set up for a perhaps unreliable narrator in the form of the German soldier relating the story to the Fuhrer, then we're hit with an amusingly anachronistic omniscient narrator...and then back to the woods with the Basterds, and back to the Fuhrer's quarters for a punchline of sorts.

Chapter Three, "German Night In Paris," is perhaps the most conventional of the lot, four proper scenes and one linking scene. The first scene, at night, introduces the narrative thread of the infatuated German private and the very uninterested young cinema owner. The following scene, set the day after, reinforces the infatuation and builds on the German's character. A linking scene gets one character into the lair, as it were, of the Nazis. And here Landa returns, and has a tense sit-down with someone who once escaped his clutches, featuring a brief flashback as a reminder And finally, there is the inspection of the cinema, which the German private believes would be a superb venue for a piece of cinematic Nazi propaganda. Within this scene, an interpolation wherein the omniscient narrator returns to discuss some significant properties of 35 mm nitrate film. All these scenes unfold in real time but are of relatively "normal" length, except for the Landa scene, which is about 15 minutes.

Chapter Four, "Operation Kino," is the most radical, rhythmically speaking. It opens with British officer and civilian film critic Archie Hicox receiving orders from General Ed Fenech (that character name's an even bigger groaner than Aldo Raine) and Churchill (nice to see Rod Taylor, been a while). Before you can say boo, Hicox is in a Nazi uniform and hanging out with the Basterds across from a basement cafe in a small French village, as Raine presciently complains that basements are not good for espionage operations. These two scenes pass briskly, and there follows the film's most audacious set-piece, a nearly half-hour bar scene involving suspect German accents, pop-culture card games, and the proper definition of a Mexican standoff. It features a single one-shot interpolation, again a flashback of one character. This is, for many, the film's make-or-break scene. If it doesn't work for you, I daresay the rest of the picture won't either. 

The aftermath is a Plan B strategizing scene in a very distracting environment; the chapter ends with a Landa coda, the officer doing his best Sherlock Holmes.

The fifth chapter—well, to give away its title would be a spoiler. But it's only here that Tarantino begins seriously cross-cutting within scenes—first, between the big movie premiere and a flashback showing the theater owner and her partner doing some "preparations" for it, and later, after some of the film's protagonists are removed from the theater. Alfred Hitchcock was famously impatient about exposition, particularly redundant exposition—you may recall his explanation to François Truffaut about why he had Cary Grant and Leo G. Carroll's dialogue drowned out by plane engines in their meet-up scene in North By Northwest—but here Tarantino inverts the maestro and uses redundant exposition as a suspense building (some have already said "annoyance-building") device, letting one character drone on about what could happen while we're all practically dying to see what's going to happen. I thought it was pretty canny, and funny, myself, and when the climactic action occurs, it's insane enough to have been worth the buildup. Then follows the film's entirely and deliberately crass coda.

And Tarantino gets there in two-and-a-half hours, using a total of, if you want to be generous, 16 "proper" scenes. I'll say it again. Heck, I'll spell it out: sixteen. David Bordwell's The Way Hollywood Tells It notes "the average two-hour script, many manuals suggests, should contain forty to sixty scenes." Oops!

So yes, I'm kind of impressed here. 

Comments

[Tom Carson]

Funny, I kept thinking of Nabokov too. Unlike you, GK, I just didn't have the balls to come out and say so. But once you grant the difference in materials -- obviously a whopping one -- the parallels get kind of interesting. Besides the chess games with chronology and perspective they both play, the complaints about Tarantino's movies deriving from movies rather than "real" life sound a lot like the way fuddy-duddy critics used to bitch about VN's fancy literary origami. The "but he's got nothing to *say*" lament is pretty familiar, too. They both get accused of arch po-mo trickery for trickery's sake when they're clearly both driven by nostalgia.

As I recall, there's even a bit in The Gift when Nabokov imagines an elderly, beloved Pushkin being applauded at a theater. Not to spoil IB's climax, but as alternative history goes, one does kind of chime with the other.

[Brian]

tc: Nabokov and nostalgia? That's a grotesque misreading, especially of the Pushkin scene. Try again.

[Tom Carson]

@Brian: I wasn't citing the Pushkin scene as an example of Nabokov's nostalgia -- just for its amusing (to me) correspondence with Tarantino's historical revisions in IB. Otherwise, why should I try again? Are you really suggesting that nostalgia/memory/lyrical obsessions with irrecoverable pasts *don't* loom kind of prominently in Nabokov's work? "Beyond the seas where I have lost a scepter/I hear the neighing of my dappled nouns," like that?

[kingofnails]

Good article. Though I hate to be a pest, I'm fairly sure the first chapter is called "Once Upon a Time...In Nazi Occupied France." Looking forward to seeing the film.

[Paul]

I largely went to see this because writers I enjoy, like yourself, rate it, while writers I dislike seem to dismiss it. So why did I spend almost the entire running time wrapped up in a big ball of cringe, with my nervous system attempting to escape my skin and walk away to a nice pub down the road for a libation? I seriously think this film demonstrates irrefutably that QT no longer plays with a full deck, or knows the difference between a clever idea and a very very stupid one. It's easy to construct a screenplay out of sixteen scenes when you're using structures drawn from pop cultural iconography, but when you play around with Sergio Leone you better have a firmer grasp of mise en scene than is displayed in the opening scene here, where we keep endlessly cutting back to the same dull shot of approaching Germans - Leone would at least have stuck on a long lens and given us another bloody pretty picture before going into the farmhouse...

[OMAR]

The opening sequence is an extended homage to one of Tarantino's favourite auteurs - Sergio Leone, even the pulling back of the sheets on the washing line to reveal the image of the Nazis arriving in the distance is a direct intertextual reference to ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’. It is this opening massacre that impressed me the most – I thought the rest of the film was merely an afterthought as Tarantino manages to condense the entire film into this one sequence. Not only is this one of the finest sequences Tarantino has directed, it relies very much on the interchange of nervous glances and most strikingly, language.

[Scott Nye]

That opening sequence is a frickin' masterpiece. The rest of the film may well be, too. I just saw it a few hours ago, so I'm still kind of wrapping my head around it; I will say this - I've seen every Tarantino film multiple times and skimmed a few reviews before seeing this, and he still manages to surprise me on so many levels. It's tempting to call this his best work, but...well, it will definitely require a second viewing, which hasn't been true of any other of the forty-four films I've seen this year.

[Account Deleted]

I finally saw this baby last night and it sure is a beauty. Definitely Tarantino's best work since 'Fiction' and I may even rank it over that to be honest. A thrilling piece of cinema, the burning screen of Shoshanna laughing as the Nazi's are wiped out may be Tarantino's finest image yet.

Thoroughly, thoroughly impressive.