Once again, the director experiments with a plot that weaves different stories in the same frame. Both plots have one goal: to topple the Nazi regime in Third Reich Germany.
On the one hand, there’s Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a Jewish girl who escaped the massacre of her family at the hand of SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) and now wants to take her revenge. On the other hand, there’s a squad of ruthless Jewish-American soldiers headed by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), who make a clean sweep of all the Nazis they encounter and plan to kill the Führer himself with the help of German actress and undercover agent Bridget Von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger).
The meeting point of the two plots is significantly a cinema, the one owned by Shosanna, which she has planned to burn down at the premiere of a German propaganda film. Metaphor that regimes can be overthrown with the power of the arts? Metaphor that only arts can redeem a shameful past? You decide.
Tarantino has the gift, if you may call it so, of making violence entertaining. If you can put up with his obsession for scalps, bear close-ups of foreheads with carved swastikas and stomach a couple of scenes splattered with blood, then you may enjoy Inglorious Basterds as a movie that reinvents the war genre altogether. A distancing soundtrack, with the director’s typical cowboy-like strumming, dots the most ferocious of scenes – including a head beating with a baseball bat. Set within a fairytale frame with the “Once upon a time...” intro, the story unfolds with continuous unpredictable twists. The finale is Shakespearean in the tragic sense of the word.
Tarantino’s taste for the grotesque is recognizable in the characters’ performances: they are so exaggerated that they become a parody of themselves. One character stands out, though: the Austrian-born actor Christoph Waltz is impeccable as Hans Landa, a cold, sharp, slightly schizophrenic SS Colonel. His stunning performance earned him, in fact, the Best Actor award at last year’s Cannes and the award for Best Supporting Actor this year’s at the Golden Globes. His language skills are also impressive.
Linguists will appreciate Tarantino’s brushstroke of realism in maintaining the characters’ own mothertongues. The movie features German, French, English –worth of notice is Pitt’s caricatured Southern accent- and a haphazardly Italian. Italian is also the inspiration for the movie. The title, in fact, is nothing but the misspelling of Inglorious Bastards, as the English version reads, a 1978 war film by Enzo Castellari.
It may not be Tarantino’s masterpiece, but Inglorious Basterds is nevertheless an ambitious effort. Hasn’t it tried to rewrite history, after all?
Rating: ***
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