Inglourious Basterds: So dastardly, it’s delicious

Film Review: Inglourious Basterds (3.5 stars)

Quentin Tarantino’s latest is an unabashedly violent tale, featuring the most brutal attack on spelling since Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. But it’s also a movie that knows the exquisite, perverse cinematic pleasure of violence deferred.

Take the opening scene, set in Nazi-occupied France, which lasts about 20 minutes but seems (in a good way) at least twice as long. Austrian actor Christoph Waltz plays an unctuous Nazi colonel with a name like a car (Hans Landa), interrogating a French dairy farmer with a name like a French dairy farmer (Perrier LaPadite) about the possible presence of hidden Jews in the region.

Landa gives an undertone of menace to the most banal pleasantries. He even drinks a glass of milk evilly. When LaPadite murmurs that all he knows are rumours, the colonel breaks into a grin that would give the Devil pause. “I love rumours!” he sings. Later, after courteously asking if he may smoke, he takes out a pipe the size of an alpenhorn. Audience reactions at these points has been to laugh – quietly.

The opening scene also introduces Mélanie Laurent as Shosanna, a Jewish refugee whose life will no doubt collide with Landa’s in a future reel. One of the many delights of this film is the number of talented, relatively unknown French and German actors who give the scenes a glint of authenticity, even as Tarantino gleefully tears up the pages of history and shuffles the scraps with excerpts from an encyclopedia of film.

Parachuting in from volume P is Brad Pitt as Lt. Aldo Raine, leader of a group of American Jewish commandos who make the Dirty Dozen look like a box of grubby doughnuts. Raine tells his group that they’re going in behind enemy lines to kill Nazis and scalp them, Injun style. Pitt, who grew up in Oklahoma and Missouri, delivers every line as though chewing on a mouthful of hominy grits; his pronunciation of “sandwich” as “sannitch” is just one suggestion that intentional misspellings went far deeper than the movie’s title.

Tarantino is known (reverentially by some, derisively by others) as a filmmaker’s filmmaker, never less so than in Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2, which at times felt like facing one of those tennis-ball ejection machines loaded with movie references. Inglourious Basterds is far less demanding to watch; the allusions are still there, but the result feels less like a master class in techniques of film homage. As in the opening scene, which plays out like a kind of spaghetti western showdown, many of the best parts can be enjoyed as pure drama, with or without knowledge of their cinematic forebears. You don’t need to have heard of G.W. Pabst’s 1929 film The White Hell of Pitz Palu – and honestly, who has?

Of course, it wouldn’t be Tarantino if the references weren’t sometimes right in your face, like the scene in which three characters debate the meaning of a Mexican standoff even as they are engaged in one. This follows another extended sequence in which a British soldier (and film critic!) posing as a Nazi tries desperately to bluff his way past a suspicious officer who turns out to be the Henry Higgins of Nazi Europe, and can’t quite place the man’s accent.

Parallel stories follow Raine’s band of merry, murderous mensches as they plan to blow up a Paris cinema at which most of the Nazi high command will be attending a premiere; and Shosanna, the owner of the theatre, who hatches a similar plot with her assistant Marcel, the Jesse Owens of French cinema projectionists. (Sorry; clunkiest metaphor ever.) The twin conspiracies provide endless grease for the wheels of the film’s plot; it’s as if Tom Cruise’s scheme in Valkyrie had run into that of another Hollywood A-lister trying to blow up Hitler.

Trailers for the film suggest that the main focus is Raine’s reign of terror, but in fact we spend as much time with Shosanna, who has become the unwitting, unwilling girlfriend of German war-hero-turned-movie-star Fredrick Zoller, played by Daniel Brühl and uneasily palling around with Josef Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda. Balancing the hero/actor scales is Diane Kruger as Bridget von Hammersmark, a double agent and Raine’s ticket to the premiere.

Inglourious Basterds has been called a revenge fantasy, an odd term given that the Allies in fact won the war. But Tarantino places the suffering of the Jews front and centre, and suggests that no amount of retribution, real or imagined, can make up for it. This might engender some hand-wringing from those of a philosophical nature, but when faced with the image of Raine carving a telltale swastika into the forehead of a captured Nazi, it becomes as simple and satisfying as anything from Indiana Jones. Tarantino’s genius is not that he mixes the brutal and the banal so efficiently, but that the resulting concoction goes down so easily.