Tarantino the Inglourious
Saturday, November 7th, 2009
This article originally appears as part of the current issue of IndianAuteur.com
At its heart, Quentin Tarantino’s latest film “Inglourious Basterds” is a western. The establishing shot in the opening sequence, drenched in the orange light of the French countryside serves as the perfect stage for a powerful scene as a car filled with four German officers pulls up to a farmer’s house. One could imagine a similar scene opening a Sergio Leone spaghetti western. The exchange of pleasantries and the lengthy, satisfying dialogue-dominated scene carries on until it reaches a rather surprising turn. This opening sequence is perhaps the best that Tarantino could come up with ever since the sweet, sugar-filled exchange between Honey Bunny and Pumpkin at the start of Pulp Fiction (1994).
Other elements in Inglourious Basterds that one could trace back to Pulp Fiction are the opening credit sequence and the multiple storylines that converge at a common point. The film is chopped up into several chapters, like a cheap paperback novel. It should be kept in mind that Tarantino started writing the initial draft for Inglourious Basterds right after Jackie Brown (1997), around the same time that he was developing the Kill Bill duology, perhaps this is why both films share the chapter-wise division.
The film recalls Reservoir Dogs (1992) in the sequence where the Americans and the English team up to discuss Operation Kino at an underground tavern. The entire plot is accidentally foiled by an undercover British Agent Lt. Archie Hicox (played by the magnificent Michael Fassbender) mistakenly giving away his Britishness by ordering for three glasses to go with scotch. The entire tavern is held at a Mexican standoff and in the end, almost everybody dies. Tarantino had previously used this same plot device in the Tony Scott-directed True Romance (1992).
There is also a heavy usage of nicknames in the film such as The Bear Jew, Aldo the Apache, The Jew Hunter etc. This is a throw back to the colour coded aliases from Reservoir Dogs and the famous nicknames of Bill’s Deadly Viper Assassination Squad in Kill Bill. All these elements may sound like Tarantino is re-hashing himself and is resorting to his limited bag of tricks but Tarantino is careful in not allowing any room for that. He instead, compiles all these old tricks of his into a sort of a “Greatest Hits”
album with some new and un-released bonus material.
Tarantino draws inspiration from genre-specific stereotypes a lot. His earlier films reference themes and mannerisms of exploitation cinema (Death Proof), blaxploitation (Jackie Brown), Yakuza Gangster films (Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs), Westerns and Wuxia films (Kill Bill). With Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino brings to light a very short-lived genre of war-inspired B-films that surfaced during the late 1960s affectionately termed as the “Macaroni War films”. Much like the spaghetti westerns, these were also English productions shot cheaply in Italy and Spain, often starring a lone C-grade Hollywood actor. Most of these films feature Hitler as more of a villainous character than a dictator- most often; the climaxes featured the protagonists killing off Hitler, usually in some brutal manner. One of the forerunners of this genre, Antonio Margheretti is mentioned as one of the aliases of Eli Roth’s character in the film.
Another genre that Tarantino explores and draws inspiration from for this film is the World War II “Films of the Third Reich “
movement”, the notorious Nazi-propaganda genre commissioned by Hitler himself. The film mentions one the movement’s pioneers, Leni Reifenstahl and a comparision is made between her and Shoshanna Dreyfus, the cinematically-inclined character of Mélanie Laurent.
In a way, Inglourious Basterds comes out as Tarantino’s love letter to cinema. Apart from the numerous homages and references to his favourite films, actors and directors, Tarantino devices cinema as a weapon and a battlefield in the film. The fact that the central assassination plot “Operation Kino” is set in a cinema hall is itself testament that cinema becomes the battlefield. Shoshanna’s plot to use highly-inflammable nitrate film to burn all the Nazi’
s alive while locked inside the theatre is how cinema becomes a weapon.
Another area where Tarantino excels in all his films is the casting department. Inglourious Basterds stars A-listers Brad Pitt and Diane Krueger in supporting roles alongside some great actors from the independent circuit such as Michael Fassbender, Mélanie Laurent, Daniel Brühl, horror filmmaker Eli Roth and Austrian television actor Christoph Waltz in the performance of his career. This pattern is reminiscent of Jackie Brown (1997) where Tarantino cast A-listers Robert DeNiro, Samuel L. Jackson, Bridgette Fonda and Michael Keaton in supporting roles alongside leads Pam Grier and Robert Forster, both washed out and obsolete B-movie and television stars from the 1970s.
As for the performances, each of the members of the great cast take turns in delivering some really commendable performances. Michael Fassbender plays a pre-war film critic who can speak German and is given the responsibility to go undercover as an SS officer and help push “Operation Kino”. Fassbender’s Lt. Archie Hicox comes almost half-way through the film but plays an important role. In his interview with Cahiers Du Cinema, Tarantino expresses how when he cast the part-Irish, part-German Fassbender, he was thinking of a young George Sanders for Hicox. Mélanie Laurent and Daniel Brühl also come up with beautiful turns as the impossible lovers and almost become a metaphoric representation of France and Germany respectively especially how Brühl’s character’s persistent and sometimes forceful advances towards Laurent’s character somehow reflect Germany’s persistent and sometimes forceful advances towards France’s beauty and vulnerability during the Second World War.
Diane Krueger provides an important supporting role as Bridget Von Hammersmark while Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine provides much of the film’s comic relief. Mike Myers and Rod Taylor guest star in short but memorable performances with Taylor playing none other than the then British Prime Minister- Winston Churchill. Martin Wuttke plays a neurotic and tantrum-throwing Adolf Hitler but in a film filled with so many great performances, the show is stolen by Christoph Waltz’s Hans Landa a.k.a. “The Jew Hunter”. Tarantino had said Waltz had “given him his film back” as he felt this character was unplayable.
In the end, this film is a critical and commercial success for Tarantino after a slightly-disappointing “Death Proof”. QT fans all around the world are tremendously satisfied and perhaps this is a milestone in his career from where things might take a different direction.
