Between Reviews: Oh, that Cheeky, Movie-crazy Basterd!
OH, THAT CHEEKY, MOVIE-CRAZY BASTERD!
Quentin Tarantino’s latest tribute to an inglourious genre may frustrate your inner academic but it totally floors the inner art-lover.
NOV 15, 2009 – DISCUSSING THE FAILURE OF STAGE FRIGHT, HITCHCOCK commented matter-of-factly to François Truffaut (in the latter’s book-length interview), “The great weakness of the picture is that it breaks an unwritten law. The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture. That’s a cardinal rule, and in this picture the villain was a flop.” If only by the Master’s yardstick, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is a smashing success. Its villain (the Nazi Jew-hunter Hans Landa, played by Christoph Waltz) looms so large, we forget, at times, that there’s a nominal hero in Brad Pitt. (The latter embodies a basterd named Lt. Aldo Raine and proves, yet again, that he’s one of the world’s biggest stars. He drew droves of ticket-buyers to the long, glacially paced The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and he’s repeated the feat here, with a film that, along with the aforementioned qualities, is mostly not even in English.)
War-movie villains are usually pitched along the continuum between sleek menace and sadistic monstrosity – Waltz, instead, walks a tightrope over broad comedy, as if he were starring in the most elegantly muted Mel Brooks farce. (And as nothing is sacred in comedy, let’s overlook the niggling questions of taste and sensitivity in playing a barbarian as a buffoon, especially in the context of the Holocaust.) Waltz doesn’t appear to have scenes so much as routines constructed around his shtick, like the bit where Landa drains a glass of milk in one uninterrupted motion and proclaims to his dairy-farmer host, “Monsieur, to both your family and your cows, I say ‘Bravo’!” How can you not laugh? It’s a hammy, self-conscious, outrageously entertaining performance, and it almost makes you overlook the fact that the character implodes when you anticipate an explosion. The final fate of Landa, even if it makes sense on some level, is a startling anticlimax.
It’s the same with Basterds. It’s hammy, self-conscious, outrageously entertaining, and it almost makes you overlook the fact that it ends on an anticlimax – which makes the two-and-a-half hour film either the longest act of cinematic foreplay or the longest Seinfeld episode, with rococo riffs swirling up to… nothing. The problem isn’t anything lofty – like, say, the lack of a moral dimension, though it’s certainly curious that Tarantino could locate throbbing veins of morality in a blood-spattered funhouse trip like the Kill Bill diptych, while Basterds remains gleefully amoral. (Think of Uma Thurman’s parting words to the young daughter of the slain Vivica A Fox; she does the “honourable thing” by extending an opportunity for revenge.) In the film’s most disturbing scene, when a German soldier refuses to rat out his fellow-men, Pitt and Co. do not acknowledge that he’s doing the “honourable thing” (or perhaps they do, but they don’t care either way) – they mercilessly bludgeon him to death.
So yes, our sympathies shift uncomfortably during that moment, with the villain acting heroically and the heroes behaving like devil-incarnate villains – but no, that’s not the problem. After all, it’s a filmmaker’s prerogative to treat his material the way he wants to, and if Tarantino’s aims are just on the level of a super-elaborate jape, a chortle-chortle revenge fantasia that assumes dark-fairy-tale dimensions (the film opens with the scrawl, “Once upon a time, in Nazi-occupied France…”), then ours is not to reason why, but simply react as the characters do or die. The problem – if, indeed, it can be called that – is that the whole of Basterds is significantly less than the sum of its mightily entertaining parts. After a first viewing, you may leave the film with a “huh?”. In Tarantino’s typical style, Basterds is divided into chapters, and each chapter ends with a big bang – sometimes literally – but there’s no accrued big bang when the chapters come together in your head.
And what a film Basterds would have been had that happened, if only based on a single image from the final chapter, irresistibly titled “Revenge of the Giant Face.” The visage in question belongs to Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent, playing one of Landa’s victims), who runs a cinema hall in Paris and who’s spliced close-ups of herself into a rah-rah Nazi-party movie being unveiled before Hitler and Goebbels and other notorious luminaries of the Third Reich. (All are targets; the film is essentially one long buildup to this assassination.) At some point, there’s a fire, the screen is consumed by flames, and the giant face, cackling with unconcealed delight, now hovers on a thick wall of smoke. The effect is holographic, suggesting a virtual-reality version of events. It’s as if it weren’t Shosanna but the Muse of Cinema herself, throwing her head back and laughing at her power to rewrite (Nazi) history.
It’s an epiphanic image – but Basterds doesn’t earn this epiphany, which appears like a tacked-on coda from elsewhere, from a German movie of the time perhaps, made by an Expressionist auteur who realised that the director was indeed God, capable (through cinema) of transforming victims into victors. Intentionally or inadvertently, Tarantino ignores this subtext. His film is a result of his wanting to play God and engineer happy endings where there were none in reality, but he’s not interested in putting himself into the movie the way Shosanna inserted herself into that other movie. He’s content to stand on the sidelines and stage a jokey aside where Hitler asks an aide for some gum – again, just a bit of shtick. It’s very entertaining shtick, but you miss the grand sense of the greater picture in, say, Jackie Brown. It’s hard to shake off the feeling that Basterds is all icing, no cake.
So it helps if, like me, you have the world’s biggest sweet tooth. One of the cheekiest achievements of Basterds is how the film, simultaneously, frustrates your inner academic while flooring the inner art-lover. At least while watching the movie, every one of the abovementioned what-might-have-been considerations are incinerated by Tarantino’s dazzling art. More than ever before, his chapters here appear to be mini-movies, complete unto themselves – where another director would braid shorter strands of the various stories into an ever-tightening climactic knot, Tarantino stacks the spools of story threads in neat order, letting each one unravel in its entirety before dawdling over to the next. The results are monochromatic patterns of glourious exposition, startlingly single-minded in content and smugly oblivious to present-day audience attention spans. This is a film that delights in its villain’s love for dairy – his first interrogation scene incorporates a glass of milk, the second squeezes in dabs of fresh cream.
The scenes play out in languorous dream-rhythms before exploding into nightmares – it’s just that you’re already sitting up in a cold sweat. When Landa interrogates the dairy farmer, Tarantino cross-cuts between their faces, and then he lets his camera swing around them in a graceful arc, so that we now see, in the frame, the door and the window. He seems to be preparing us for something – a Jewish rescue squad breaking and entering, perhaps? – but the scene simply continues as before, with talking, and more talking, and then more talking. We’ve heard of directors tugging at our heartstrings, but this director is more interested in our frayed nerves – he plucks them lazily, teasingly, sending up shivers of anticipation (that a resolution is finally at hand, that the endless dialogue is finally going to give way to action), and then he stands back and grins as we clench our fists at being fooled… yet again. A scene in an underground tavern, in particular, is unbearable. We’ve always been told that the pen is mightier than the sword, but here we actually see it – in Tarantino’s hands, words are more terrifying than weapons.
Some of these words wrap themselves around entertainingly windy discursions, like Landa’s treatise on why rats are deserving of contempt while the similarly rodent-like squirrels aren’t. And some of these words are just plain showstoppers, as when Pitt refers to “disemboweled, dismembered, and disfigured bodies.” (Has there been a war movie earlier that allowed Allied alliteration?) The unexpectedness with which Tarantino uses words is paralleled by his unheralded musical cues. When could-have-been lovers kill each other, the splatter of their gunfire is drowned in a surge of exquisitely romantic movie-music (taken from some obscure older film, I’ll bet, what with Tarantino’s incurable glad eye for the cinematic past), as if informing us that love and death are but two sides of the same coin. With a more high-minded director, this would have been the scene that launched a thousand film-school theses about the twinning of eros and thanatos.
But not with Tarantino, whose career – built around the most inglourious of movie genres – seems almost perversely tailored towards demolishing the myth that high-class craft should be placed in service of high-minded cinema. (“It’s amazing what human beings are capable of once they abandon their dignity,” says Landa at one point, as if echoing Tarantino’s gleeful mission statement.) But what’s undeniable is his love for cinema – not just the exploitation movie and the Spaghetti Western and the war movie and the splatter movie, but for cinema cinema. Like his other films, Inglourious Basterds is stacked with such a surfeit of name-dropping that a serious film buff should not, at any cost, venture in without a diaper. (GW Pabst! Emil Jannings! Leni Riefenstahl! Max Linder! Chaplin! Sergeant York! Henri-Georges Clouzot! David O Selznick! Louis B Mayer! Even the name of the mission, Operation Kino, might be a nod to the art-film distributor.)
But that’s simply the surface. This is possibly the only wartime adventure set in a movie theatre for such an extended duration, with 35-mm nitrate film as one of the primary weapons of mass destruction. This is film-love taken to its unapologetic apotheosis. Even when Pitt and Co. break a renowned Nazi-killer out of jail, the language is pure movie-language. “We just wanted to say we’re a big fan of your work… I think you show great talent. And I pride myself on having an eye for that kind of talent. But your status as a Nazi killer is still amateur. We all come here to see if you wanna go pro.” (This could be a forties’ director speaking to the ingénue he wants to groom into a star.) That’s the reason, more than anything else, we celebrate Tarantino. You think this is going to be just another variation on The Dirty Dozen, perhaps cheekier, gorier, funnier – but little else. What you don’t expect is a near-profound meditation on movie-love, from a director who’s quite possibly unrivalled, today, in his love for the movies.
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Wow! I did nt want your review to end. Fantastic writing. *salutes*
wow! wow! wow! its as if someone made a chocolate out of this movie and fed it to us! awesome review! you precisely know when to use the right kind of words, dont u, sir?
i’ll send this link to QJ Tarantino (he is in twitter
, by the way do you use twitter?
personally, i think this movie is an awesome gruesome poetry!
This movie came out months ago, was it just released in India?
Still in a daze after watching the movie yesterday (Thanks to Mr. Pitt for keeping it in the theatres for this long).
“… overlook the fact that it ends on an anticlimax.”
Not just the ending, but the whole movie I would say. At first, I was quite frustrated that it didn’t have enough basterds. It was like I went in to watch Kill Bill vol 1 and ended up watching vol 2. What no cutaway flash backs about Donny or the Little Man? Not one “battle” scene where the basterds tactically polish off Nazis? Tarantino makes a war movie … not! Casting the biggest star available and make him watch the climax from the sidelines – with his hands literally tied behind his back, no less. Even the standoff in the tavern was not authentically Mexican (Tex-Mex at best).
But, in hindsight I have to say, ‘It’s a bingo’. Its a Tarantino movie. I should have learnt to expect the unexpected by now. Maybe the whole movie was a snub to our movie bloodlust. In every single chapter we would like the tension to end as quickly as possible, preferably with a lot of violence. But he won’t let us pretend that we just want to get it over with quickly. He makes us laugh in the middle of an unbearable scene (the sherlock holmes pipe or King Kong for example). And the violence itself, is not what we expect it to be. Like the tavern scene, the action is over before you can understand what the frick just happened. In the german soldier interrogation scene, as the Bear Jew hits it out of the park, we see his fellow soldiers enjoy the show along with us. Raine even remarks that Donny is “closest we ever get to going to the movies”. Later in the movie, as the Nazi buffoons enjoy the movie (with Allied soldiers dropping off like flies), we are treated to donny and omar taking down a couple of guards. The soundtrack fills with applause from the audience of the movie-within-the-movie eerily matching our own reactions. I felt like the rug being pulled out from under me. I think, for all his icing, we are the cake.
But it was indeed a truly entertaining movie. There are several questions that will have to wait for later viewings. Why did Landa like and then not like his nickname? Does Raine being a non-jewish hick from podunk Tennessee have a larger point? Can we really detest Nazis for liking and enjoying “Nation’s pride”? After all thats what we wanted to watch here, right? But, right now, I am just enjoying the afterglow.
Btw, did you think all that milk was a reference to There will be blood, particularly after his declaration of rivalry with PTA?
It was funny how he had to have a scene to justify how shoshanna got the 35mm print developed. It was so important for him to address that. I say, there’s a true movie geek.
Also, lol at “… allowed Allied alliteration”. I wonder how John Wayne would have rendered the line.
“allowed Allied alliteration”… Nice touch
Loved the shootout scene in the old tavern; the ending was kind of unexpected but the buildup and the almsot never-ending dialogues made it an intriguing scene.
The ending seemed so much of an anti-climax, especially when you’d expect the theatre explosion to have been the finale but then with Tarantino, you should not expect anything at all.
Of couse, you must give a special mention to Christopher Waltx for an almost chillingly entertaining portrayal of Hans Landa.
Smashing piece on the basterds…. Even I felt that the movie was a bit of an anti climax… but couldnt help grinning when Tarantino makes Brad Pitt speak the dialogue “I think this might just be my masterpiece” as a self reference. Loved the part where you write about the muse of cinema rewriting Nazi history
Arun: Reg. “by the way do you use twitter?” er… no!
Sri: Just a couple of weeks back in Chennai.
Gaipajama: Good to see you here, and a great comment. You’re a bit of a snob about which posts to delurk for, aren’t you?
Reg. “There are several questions that will have to wait for later viewings.” Exactly. I didn’t think about that PTA reference at all, but now that you bring it up… And thanks for noticing (also, Ashish Kulkarni) the show-off alliteration. I’m usually never happy with what I write, but this is one time I allowed myself a small pat on the back
Richard Corliss writes –
a moment in bed with a German officer and his French interpreter;
Did you see it in Chennai? I did not. Did they cut a lot(?) here in India?
“that a resolution is finally at hand, that the endless dialogue is finally going to give way to action”
I never thought the dialogue was endless.. The dialogue formed the crux of the whole scene. It was about how this expert jew hunter, could smell his rat out by just talking to that house owner, who just moments before seemed like the most calm person one would ever meet. This guy got sweaty, scared and nervous by the end of the dialogue and gave his hideout away. It was a neat plan by the jew hunter, and that was the masterpiece.
The whole drinking milk thing was only his preparation of this masterpiece dialogue.
Well, when one goes to movies, its best to keep their guessing/prediction abilities aside and enjoy the movie for what it is, and not what it could or should have been ?!
– “may frustrate your inner academic but it totally floors the inner art-lover.”
I thought it fully satisfied my inner academic too! Almost every scene was rich and vivacious with the perfect dialogue and body language. The dark humour may get to some people too ruthlessly but thats Tarantino for you! It was a very smart/intelligent and cool movie; thats typically an awesome and rare combination.(exactly like dark knight)
Brilliant review Mr. Rangan. A fresh review too.
But I am not able to come to terms with the fact that many find the movie “good-in-parts, less altogether”.
Tarantino could have made individual movies out of the basterds, Landa and Shoshanna. But by thrusting in more, he achieves a whole new effect, I felt. The movie is, in fact, exploding with each character trying to push the movie’s boundary in a different direction. And in the end, like Tarantino’s style, the whole movie pops.
And I cannot accept the claim that IB is amoral or immoral. QT is infact, criticizing all of us by calling each of us Nazi’s (the final iamge is the most over manifestation of this). He is breaking our complacency towards history by questioning if the Nazis are over and done with at all? It is clearly more moral than exploitative films like Schindler’s List.
Here’s are two great articles on the morality of IB:
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/the-deep-morals-of-inglourious-basterds/
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/tarantino_is_an_inglourious_basterd/
Infact, what was unnerving and confusing for me was, why this Landa guy who had essentially been planning to turn over to the American side once Hitler’s fate seemed to close in, had to jump on that actress’s neck and kill her her so vengefully and atrociously (losing his dignity one might say?!
)… Where did that emotion come from ? I felt that was a character inconsistency.
Padawan: Yes, I did. And I don’t recall such a scene.
Just Another Film Buff: And that is why I said, “After a first viewing, you may leave the film with a “huh?”.” And what you write after a first viewing is almost always gut-reaction. I haven’t yet fully made sense of the film in my head. It’ll take, oh, a few years
Thanks for the links.
I missed the “Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied France” bit…but now that i think of it, the opening scene did look like it was from a Sergei Leone film…
This is outright brilliant writing. You outdid yourself with this review. This could be one of your best.
I have wondered if the episodic nature of this movie (which I do not resent) was not planned per se, but was a result of commercial considerations. For example, Kill Bill was shot to be released as a single movie. But after Tarantino delivered a much longer version, the Weinsteins agreed to not leave large portions on the editing room floor and released the film as separate Volume I and Volume II movies. ‘Basterds’ clearly is a pet project for Tarantino. [The last words spoken in the movie even are "I think this is my best one yet" (Really, Mr Tarantino?)]. And I suspect he delivered a very long version that had to be trimmed down (no seperate Volumes I and II this time), and hence the episodic build for the movie? For example as someone else commented, it is curious there are no scenes of the Inglorious Basterds taking on the Nazis en force in large numbers. The DVD release of the movie may shed more light.
Great movies make for great reviews but this is just fantastic stuff. You should really be out there creating stuff with such breadth of thought. When is K2K out?
especially loved the final dialog… this could well be my masterpiece… that’s the director talking through pitt… brilliant…
But then of course! Why are you surprised?
The movie was a nod at movie making. The War was just a pretext.
And Tarantino always kills the star. Of course Brad Pitt had to lose – that was the biggest blast. Remember Pulp Fiction?
As for deep theories from QTs head to dialogue? That has been there since Reservoir Dogs if not in Jackie Brown. Remember Superman in Kill Bill? And you missed the Olympic Gold Winners in IB.
WHat about the nuance of unanswered theories? Did Landen recognise Shosana and decide to play with her? Or did he seriously not recognise her? Was he, afterall human? Remember the briefcase in Pulp Fiction?
Tarantino hunts for his music even before he thinks of movies. It had to be good.
Theres a lot of cake, but its as soft and sweet as the icing. I hope you see it again and realise the subtle nuances you missed – or perhaps didnt mention in this long post.