Inglourious Basterds

(2009) dir. Quentin Tarantino
viewed: 09/05/09 at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, SF, CA

Quentin Tarantino’s latest film is a bit of a surprise for me.  He’s the kind of guy that either evokes rabid appreciation or absolute disdain.  And after his last film, Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof (2007), I was reaching more deeply into the latter camp.  What is surprising to me is not that Inglorious Basterds has also received either rapt appreciation or utter scorn, but rather that I find myself in between those two extremes, finding myself in the place of “liking”, not loving, not loathing.

The movie is an entertaining romp of sorts, following a group of “Nat-see” hunters, led by Brad Pitt, a group of Jewish soldiers who run an Apache-like murder spree of any and all Nazi soldiers they encounter.  But also it follows the story of a French Jewish girl, who escapes her family’s slaughter, moves to Paris and runs a cinema, and has a passionate desire for revenge.  It all culminates in a successfully catastrophic end to WWII, one that has nothing to do with history, other than it picks its characters from it to an extent.

It’s a fantasy version of WWII, a revision of history.  It’s a revenge film in the classic sense, revenge of the Jews against the Nazis, empowering the Jewish portion of the resistance to be the ones who take down Hitler, Goebbels, and the rest of the Nazi hierarchy who are all trapped in a cinema, watching a propaganda film about a German sniper who killed over 200 American soldiers in one day.

The film is also significantly focused on cinema.  Typical of a Tarantino script, with characters who all have a grand knowledge of directors, actors and movies, but this film includes the notable destruction of the Nazi party by burning them alive in a cinema.  A cinema burned down with highly flammable nitrate film, while a film of the proprietress projects ghostly onto the screen and the smoke, taunting them as the burn and are shot to death by two Jewish-American soldiers.  One member of the Basterds is a former British film critic.  The whole plot turns around the promotion of one propaganda film.  And the Mata Hari-like spy is a top German film actress.  And Goebbels himself, is a filmmaker.

So what does all this mean?  In cinema: revenge?  And why a revenge film focused so much on Jewish heroism, violence, and retribution?  What is the intent or meaning?

Tarantino, as well, cites himself.  Thankfully, his visage is never really onscreen, but his self-reference is powerful.  In the recognition of cinema, the French people’s appreciation for “directors”, but even in his own citing of his trademarks.  It’s well-known that Tarantino uses “the Mexican stand-off” as a recurring trope, something he confiscated from other movies he liked, in which a number of characters are caught in a scene pointing guns at one another, waiting for something to happen before the carnage ensues.  In this case, Pitt’s character actually uses the term in discussing the nature of the situation to a German soldier, citing in plain language the set-up of the scene and drawing attention to the director.

But ultimately, the very ending scene, after Pitt has carved a swastika onto the face of a Nazi villain, the camera, looking up at Pitt and another “basterd”, catches Pitt’s estimation of his work, looking down upon the cinema’s audience, and he says, “I think this just might be my masterpiece.”  Cut to “Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino” on the screen.  Um, that is one trope that I did understand.

The thing is sprawling and strange.  The whole set-up, an alternative universe version of World War II, set entirely for the possibility of the scenario of the film, this revenge destruction of the Nazis by the very people that they had sought to exterminate.  On a grand scale of course.  But what the heck is he trying to say?  It doesn’t feel like it makes a lot of sense, outright.

But it is entertaining, not grating or hateful as Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof.  And it had me thinking, spinning cogs and wheels in my brain, though not to any significant conclusions.  So, masterpiece or not, and I would lean toward the “not”, it’s hardly as atrocious or spectacular as one might hear or suspect.

And if anybody has a better handle on the “read” of the film (and not just saying that he doesn’t even know himself), please feel free to ping me and let me know.  And because of the intentionally mysterious re-spelling of “basterds”, in which he is quoted as saying that he’ll never reveal why he changed the spelling (the film at one time was intended to be a re-make of Enzo G. Castellari’s The Inglorious Bastards (1978), though it’s not at all the same).  I don’t know.  It’s a perplexing wonder, though not necessarily profound.