The Philippine Online Chronicles

Inglourious Basterds is a war movie filtered through the lens of Quentin Tarantino, which is to say that it isn’t a war movie at all.

(WARNING:  SPOILER ALERT)

It does take place during a war (‘Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France’), and the characters are primarily soldiers, spies and war victims, but that’s where the similarities between Basterds and, say, Saving Private Ryan or Letters from Iwo Jima ends. Full-scale battles are replaced by quiet conversations in small-town taverns or French restaurants. Ideas like patriotism or freedom or band-of-brotherhood-ness gives way to dialectic about films and film-makers, clever nicknames, and strudel. The ending has also caused a bit of controversy – suffice it to say that Basterds disagrees with the textbook ending of World War II.

Nonetheless, Quentin Tarantino fans will find plenty to fawn over as the two-and-a-half-hour spectacle offers viewers everything one has come to expect of a Tarantino film – a deliberate twisting of the genre, a tempered mix of violence and knife-sharp dialogue, and plenty of tongue-in-cheek, sometimes gruesome, humor. On the other hand, those who have never seen a Tarantino film can consider this a crash course on what sets him apart from the rest of Hollywood’s crop of directors, not just in style, but in audacity.

Dissection of moments

Contrary to what the trailers might have you believe, the film does not center on the exploits of Lieutenant Aldo Raine’s (played by a thickly-accented Brad Pitt) Nazi-killing band of soldiers. The Basterds only cover half the story. The other half follows a French Jew named Shosanna Dreyfus (portrayed by an intense Melanie Laurent) who survives the killing of her family and goes into hiding as a cinema owner in Paris. Although their narrative yarns never quite overlap, both encounter the villain "Jew Hunter" Hans Landa (played by Christoph Waltz, who won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival for it), and ultimately find themselves in the cinema where the climax takes place.

Although violence does occur in abrupt, bloody splashes (heads are scalped, baseball bats are swung, and many people get shot) the majority of the film’s running time is eaten up by dialogue in the moments leading up to the big fat kills. As in other Tarantino movies the joy is in the dissection of such moments.

Scenes meander through meals, parlor games and interrogations, with characters waxing poetic over why Eli Roth’s character is called the "Bear Jew," or how an English accent differs from a German one. Tarantino labored for a decade developing the script that finally became Inglourious Basterds and the effort shows. Some of the dialogue in Basterds is as memorable as the exchanges between Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta in Pulp Fiction ("Royale with Cheese"), or the Tip Conversation from Reservoir Dogs ("You never tip?").

The dialogue tightens as scenes inevitably lead to the carving of Swastikas, or Mexican stand-offs, or cinemas burning.

But it is the element of deceit, more than the violence, that brings tension to the scenes. The audience has the advantage of knowing exactly who the undercover agent is, or who is secretly a Jew, or who has discovered another’s well-laid plans, but Tarantino takes his time, allowing the characters to smile and lie to each other’s faces while they cock their guns under the table.

Numerous plots, like separate lines on a web, wind out and are enacted, but never quite with the results the characters planned. Up until the film’s climax, one is never quite sure who will be killed, whose plan will succeed.

Revenge fantasy

As most of the plots have to do with killing Nazis (and killing the major Nazi brass), some critics believe that the movie is entirely a revenge fantasy, a vehicle by which Jews can get back, through fiction, at the Nazis.

In some ways this is true – the Basterds were put together solely to wreak havoc among the Germans, while Shosanna’s attempts to “send a message to Germany” involves the use of highly flammable materials. The movie’s ending is also a complete re-writing of how the war ended, possibly showing how the Jews might have wanted it to end. One feels a palpable sense of relish in it.

However, this isn’t the sort of revenge dealt purely for the satisfaction of it.

Tarantino introduces an interesting moral dilemma in having, as one critic describe it, Jews act like Nazis. For instance, one scene features the Basterds bringing forward a captive German soldier to ask him for the coordinates of another German band. Rather than betray his country, the soldier accepts death at the baseball bat of Donny Donowitz. Before killing him, Donny points to a medal on the soldier’s chest and asks him if he "got that for killing Jews." With fitting--if rather disorienting--samurai flick music playing in the background, the solider tells him he got it "for bravery." Donny then proceeds to clobber the man into pulp. The Basterds greet this with applause. It wasn’t just an execution, it was entertainment.

The actions of the Basterds not only appall Hitler and the Nazis but the audience as well. It shows that revenge is hardly a one-sided matter, and neither the Basterds nor Shosanna are what one might call heroes. Neither looks forward to a happy ending either.

Nonetheless, every bit of blood spilled or plot concocted leads up to the moment history is re-written in a burning cinema in Paris. It is at that point that revenge becomes not just a matter of scalping some Nazis, but claiming a moment in history that never actually happened.

In a commentary on the movie in the Jewish Journal, Eli Roth’s father Sheldon Roth says this:

“There are two kinds of facts: historical facts and emotional ones... Emotional facts, or feelings, are a condensed, animal form of personal history; expanding them tells the story of one’s life. Feelings are just as much a reality as facts.”

“Art, similarly, functions as a condensed statement about life. When art resonates with an audience, those emotions are real — they cannot be dismissed because the story is ‘historically inaccurate.’ Quentin Tarantino understood it was more important to be emotionally accurate than to follow a story previously written by history.”

Blatantly reconstructing the end of World War II is hardly in the province of your typical war movie. In a Quentin Tarantino film however, anything is possible.

Inglourious Basterds was shown exclusively at Robinson's Movieworld Cinemas. The DVD was recently released on December 15, 2009.

Further Reading:

• Roger Ebert’s review of Inglourious Basterds where he describes Tarantino as a ‘director of quixotic delights.’
• Newsweek review of InglouriousBasterds discussing how ‘Jews are turned into Nazis’.
• A review of Basterds on DVD by Katu.com.
• An interview with Christoph Waltz on /Film about working with Quentin Tarantino and playing the infamous Colonel Hans Landa.