Release Date: Aug. 21
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Writer: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Brad Pitt, Mélanie
Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Diane Kruger
Cinematographer: Robert Richardson
Studio/Run Time: The Weinstein Company,
153 mins.
The Glourious Fantasy of Quentin
Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino’s dual loves of
vengeance and cinema have never had a purer expression than the face
of a Jewish cinematheque owner projected Oz-like onto the smoke of
Nazis aflame. The story goes like this: In the middle of the war,
propagandist Joseph Goebbels plans to screen his latest pro-Nazi film
for the party’s elite at a small Parisian theatre that is,
unbeknownst to Goebbels, run by Shosanna Dreyfus who lost her family
to the SS. She plans to welcome the brass into her establishment and
then set the place on fire, but only after revealing to the crowd,
via cinema, the identity of the woman who did them in.
It’s hard to say whether Inglourious
Basterds is Tarantino’s best film, but it’s certainly his
soberest, and given the hideous trailer and the implication that he
was going to make a farce out of genocide, that’s far better than
I’d feared. The opening scene at a Parisian farmhouse would not be
out of place in any serious drama about World War II, until several
minutes into the tense conversation when SS officer Hans Landa pulls
something out of his pocket. Landa is a talking villain, the type
that goes on and on with faux civility, but as played by Christoph
Waltz and written by Tarantino, he’s a riveting force, evil
incarnate with a gentleman’s face, a powder keg with an
exceptionally long fuse.
Strutting in another part of Europe is
Brad Pitt’s Lt. Aldo Raine, whose twang and hamminess feel like
they were plucked from a Coen Brothers movie. All the storylines
eventually intersect in the theatre, but Raine never really shares
the frame with Shosanna, which is just as well. He’s the jokester
of the film, and she’s the aggrieved heart. He’s the American who
makes a sport out of killing—scalping—the bad guys, but she’s
the one with the right to an elegant moral victory. He’s the one
who conspires with a German actress and makes her a part of his own
scheme to kill the high command, and he’s also the one who casts
himself in the plot as an unconvincing Eye-talian. In essence, Aldo and
Shosanna are two sides of a certain filmmaker, the artist and the
tactician, the poet and the showman. Splitting the two may be
Tarantino’s most introspective flourish to date.
To an almost touching degree,
Inglourious Basterds recognizes that the vengeance driving so many
films—and certainly Tarantino’s own—is a cinematic impulse,
a fantasy of light and sound, a bonfire of highly combustible nitrate
film stock, cleanly separated from common sense and actual history.
For once, Tarantino doesn’t allude left and right to other movies,
but instead makes celluloid itself a literal part of the story. Put
another way, he draws his story into the celluloid.
A few critics have taken Tarantino to
task for changing history to make Jews the aggressors, and some have
even likened this inversion to Holocaust denial. A couple of years
ago, filmmaker Harun Farocki assembled footage that was shot in the
1940s by Germans in the Westerbork holding camp, a way station in the
Netherlands for prisoners en route to Auschwitz. The footage shows
Jews laboring in factories and fields, sometimes smiling and
sometimes taking a break from farm work by lying in heaps on the
ground. Clearly, they don’t know where they’re headed. The power
of Farocki’s silent film, which he calls Respite, lies in our
having seen the pictures that he omits, the afterimage of corpses
lying in heaps, just like this, spit from an evil Nazi machine. While
Tarantino isn’t nearly so contemplative, he similarly expects us to
draw the parallels to unseen events. When he gathers the Nazi high
command inside a theatre rigged to burn, he doesn’t need to show
footage of similar, Nazi-orchestrated atrocities to bring them to
mind. Far from Holocaust denial, the image is Holocaust-dependent,
the earlier image perversely acting as the springboard for a fantasy.
The film readily accepts that the domain of cinema is to make its own
reality by recasting the images in our heads and reflecting something
about our basest wishes in the process.
Basterds also celebrates, in
Tarantino’s low-rent, pulpy way, the well-known cases of
resistance, like the Warsaw uprising and the escape from Sobibor
concentration camp, both orchestrated by Jews. Spielberg—the man
who melted Nazi faces by showing them the Ark of the Covenant—explored similar notions of retribution in Munich. His film takes
place decades after World War II and focuses on a different enemy,
but the Israeli anger on display clearly draws energy from prior
persecution.
If there’s a moral difference between
the approaches of these two filmmakers, besides Spielberg’s license
to draw on his own heritage, it’s that Munich goes on to question
the validity of tit-for-tat justice. Tarantino never takes that step.
Death Proof ends with the final blows of vengeance in freeze frame.
Zed disappears from Pulp Fiction with the flippant line, “Zed’s
dead, baby. Zed’s dead.” And a character at the end of
Inglourious Basterds looks upon his violent handiwork and says, “This
just might be my masterpiece,” a line followed quickly and
audaciously by the big-screen text: “Written & Directed by
Quentin Tarantino.” But choosing such moments to end his various
romps is partly what keeps his films from being masterpieces. He’s
enormously talented, almost unceasingly creative, but weirdly
divorced from the questions we face daily and the implications of his
characters’ codes. In the words of the six-fingered man: He’s got
an overdeveloped sense of vengeance, and it’s going to get him into
trouble one day.
Nevertheless, he manages to ignite the
screen time and again.