Inglorious Basterds: More Meta-Movie Mayhem from the Master

CAUTION: CONTAINS SPOILERS. If you haven’t seen the film yet click here and read the pre-review.

Several years ago, before the release of Kill Bill Vol. 2, Quentin Tarantino went on a late night talk show and shared his vision for the ultimate film premiere. He would go out onto the streets of Los Angeles and hand out tickets to fifty Crips and fifty Bloods, have them enter from separate entrances into a darkened theater, sit through the entirety of Kill Bill, then raise the lights at the end, sit back, and watch the mayhem ensue. Since this plan has little real-world capability, even for the twisted genius mind of Tarantino, he translated his plan into the medium he knows best—film. He substituted Nazis and Jews for Crips and Bloods, and added a scorned woman for sizzle and here we have Inglorious Basterds.

After a credits sequence that could easily be subtitled “Fun with Fonts,” the film opens “Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied France” where Monsieur LaPatite, a dairy farmer, is chopping wood on his peaceful farm. Enter Hans Landa, “the Jew Hunter,” a Nazi detective who takes a gleeful approach to murdering Jews. Before long, the JH discovers the family hiding under the floorboards and open fires, killing all but the teenaged Shosanna who flees across the fields as Landa watches from the doorway of the farmhouse. This shot exactly mimics the famous doorway image from John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), a film that is not only a revenge tale of the first degree, but also pits iconic enemies against each other (Cowboy/Indian) in the midst of a genocide. This allusion was very intentional—production designer David Wasco copied the look of the farmhouse from The Searchers to create the LaPatite set, which is little surprise since Tarantino is notorious for copying shots from classics. (Recall the black and white fight scene in Kill Bill Vol. 1? It’s rumored that the scene was shot in black and white because it is so bloodstained the film couldn’t slip under the NC-17 radar in color, but just after the film turns back to color, a door opens to a Japanese garden where Beatrix Kiddo will face down O-Ren Ishii. In this image the mise en scène is a near carbon copy of black-and-white Dorothy opening the door to Oz.)

Thus the film begins, gauntlet down. Next, we meet the Inglorious Basterds themselves, Jews from the American Army who vow to murder and scalp a hundred Nazis apiece. Headed up by Brad Pitt in full character, the Basterds are the brilliant Tarantino twist: by laying out a convincing case for revenge, Tarantino not only justifies brutality, he celebrates it, and his directing is such that the audience is always on board.

With a renewed thirst for blood, we watch as Shosanna’s plot for revenge and the Basterds’ mission converge at a Parisian cinema that is literally transformed into a theater of war. Years after the opening sequence, Shosanna owns a cinema that is only allowed to run Goebbels-approved German propaganda films. By some twist of fate, it comes to pass that Shosanna will host a film premiere to be attended by Goebbels, the Führer himself, all of his right-hand men, and Hans Landa, the Jew Hunter who killed her family. Shosanna and her lover, Marcel, put their revenge plan into action. They make their own film that they splice into the fourth reel of the propaganda film, showing the Nazis the face of the Jew who is about to kill them, then they burn the place down by igniting their collection of 350 hyper-flammable nitrate films as fuel. Unbeknownst to Shosanna, the Basterds are operating their own kamikaze mission to destroy the theater and everyone in it. Why have one ending when you can have them all? Tarantino feels free to rewrite history to his will, and the results are most delightful. He always lets the punishment fit the crime, and in his world, the Jews themselves killed Hitler while movies—film itself—is the weapon that murders German propaganda! Ah, sweet revenge.

There are some intentionally tedious parts that bore but cleanse the palate, re-sensitizing us to the violence and action sequences that QT always delivers, and fans can’t help but enjoy the fact that the film is Tarantino through and through: juvenile, unrefined, almost laughable in its adolescent boyishness one moment, then poignant and pure in the next. It is a collage of his favorite genres from Western oaters to the classics of German cinema, and even when he’s aiming for pastiche, Tarantino can’t help but leave his mark on every frame. Above all, Tarantino finally gets to showcase his love of the cinema experience, a feeling that is easy to share. -Christianne Hedtke

Writer/Director: Quentin Tarantino