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.
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