Basterdsof Tarantino

Dubby Bhagat

KATHMANDU: Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds shows the master filmmaker bending, twisting and making WW2 his own personal fantasy. Right from the get go, we know we are in Tarantino territory when the first chapter opens with “Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France”; it prepares the audience for a quirky brilliant film — some say Tarantino’s best of the seven he’s made.

The title is taken from Enzo Castellari’s 1978 movie. Both he and original star Bo Svenson have cameos in the movie.

In keeping with the opening line and with a multi-national cast to support all the people from different countries, we have a beautiful scene of a countryside where SS Colonel Hans Landa played by Christoph Waltz (who won the prize for best actor at Cannes) puts the mental thumbscrews on a farmer suspected of harbouring Jews.

It’s a cat-and-mouse game and a killer opening and the Colonel is gentle but cruel — you don’t know whether to kill him or to offer him quiche (this being France).

In the background, a song from a John Wayne movie plays and then Landa lets the farmer’s daughter (Melanie Laurent) survive running for her life and so Chapter One ends. You know that it’s going to be — maybe — a revenge film.

Chapter Two is Brad Pitt’s Lt Aldo Raine giving his Jewish revenge-squad their orders: Kill Nazis; 100 scalps per soldier. Then it’s fast forward to 1944 and we have skipped years of chopping and lopping. Bullets are rationed. Explosions rare. Pitt’s not in it much. None of the Basterds are.

Laurent is the film’s de facto protagonist, surfacing three years after her escape as the now-blonde, payback-plotting owner of a Parisian cinema. The French actress sinks conviction into her character’s quiet cunning and cool resolve; she’s the best dye-job WW2 heroine you have seen.

Waltz keeps the high jinks in check, but there are overcooked caricatures elsewhere. Martin Wuttke’s hysterical Hitler is more Chaplin than chilling. Mike Myers misjudges his tally-ho British general. Pitt is a cartoon Clark Gable. Is he spoofing his own megawattage? Maybe, but the mannerisms — jutting chin, Southern drawl — labour the laughs. He has some meaty speeches, yet his scant screen time isn’t a huge regret.

Some will cavil more over the lack of action, although when it comes, it’s a kick — notably a bar shootout (involving the beautiful allied agent Diana Kruger, sudden, rapid carnage after a marathon dialogue session) that freezes on — what else — a Mexican stand-off. Other Tarantino trademarks are alive and well too: An eclectic, electric soundtrack made from other soundtracks (The Alamo, Cat People, Ennio Morricone) and a spot of foot fetishism, played sexy and sinister.

Nobody executes dramatic shifts in tone more effectively and powerfully than Tarantino, and Inglourious Basterds transitions breathlessly between moments of high tension and high comedy, brutal carnage and light-hearted whimsy — all of which are peppered with the director’s distinctive dialogue and trademark wit. The film is easily his best work since 1994’s Pulp Fiction.

Last word goes to Richard T Jameson who says, “Again, be warned: This is not your ‘Greatest Generation’, Saving Private Ryan WWII. The sadism of Raine and his boys can be as unsavoury as the Nazi variety; Tarantino’s latest cinematic protégé, Eli (director of Hostel) Roth, is aptly cast as a self-styled ‘golem’ fond of pulping Nazis with a baseball bat. But get past that, and the sometimes disconcerting shifts to another location and another set of characters, and the movie should gather you up like a growing floodtide. Tarantino told the Cannes Film Festival audience that he wanted to show ‘Adolf Hitler defeated by cinema’. Cinema wins.”

Watch for Oscars.