Quentin Tarantino (2009)
The best and worst things about it are that Tarantino is so talented. His screenplay is cleverly structured and he writes dialogue for different voices with ease. In the first and third main sections of the film (it’s divided into five ‘chapters’), he builds and sustains suspense expertly. All the way through, he creates images that stay in your mind. Some are flamboyantly spectacular – literally so in the case of a cinema conflagration, with the audience trying to escape. Some images focus on particular objects in a powerfully expressive way: at the end of a scene in which the realisation of a terrible threat is deferred, a cigarette is extinguished in a dish of whipped cream; later on, a high-heeled shoe incriminates its owner in a grim glass slipper parody. Other images seem innocuous at the time and are transformed in retrospect. Two groups of drinkers play a game in which each person writes the name of someone famous on a label and passes it to their neighbour, who then, without looking at the label, sticks it on their forehead and asks questions of the others to try and guess their celebrity identity. The sequence ends with nearly all these people shot dead so that the labels both suggest a price on their heads and foreshadow injury to that part of their body. Inglourious Basterds runs a little over two and a half hours: it immediately acquires and rarely loses momentum; the pace is varied but never flags. Several weeks after seeing it, I felt chastened reading Tarantino’s interview with Ryan Gilbey in Sight and Sound: a lot more thought and discrimination had gone into the film than I’d appreciated. But I still think Inglourious Basterds is deplorable and that its thoughtfulness may be worse than its mindlessness. (It serves me right for thinking the most offensive thing might be the spelling of the title.)
The eponymous heroes are a bunch of American-Jewish soldiers whose mission – from 1941 until the end of World War II – is to kill Nazis (the Basterds’ preferred method is to beat their victims to death with baseball bats). Because what they did to the Jews is most people’s definition of genocidal evil, showing the Nazis in any context other than documentary or sober historical drama tends to be controversial – whether as a metaphorical illustration of purely personal experience (like the references in some of Sylvia Plath’s poems) or as comedy (even something like ‘Allo ‘Allo). Tarantino’s use of the Nazis here is morally questionable on one level and morally indefensible on another. He is, notoriously, a filmmaker steeped in the films of others. In his early twenties, he spent his days behind the counter of a Manhattan video rental store, watching films whenever he wasn’t serving customers. In my experience of his work – Reservoir Dogs (although I didn’t stay the course), Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and From Dusk Till Dawn (which he wrote but which Robert Rodriguez directed) – Tarantino rarely suggests a world created from anything beyond other films that he’s seen or a sensibility exposed to a range of influences wider than cinema. (Jackie Brown is the only, partial exception.) To a considerable extent, the Nazis in Inglourious Basterds are presented as if they are part of film history rather than human history. This applies as much to the real people included in the film as to the principal fictional Nazi of the story, Colonel Hans Landa. Tarantino isn’t constrained by what actually happened to the Nazi high command: Hitler, Goebbels, Goring et al are either gunned down by the Basterds in the Paris cinema where the film’s climax is set or among the casualties when the place goes up in flames.
Landa, although played by Christoph Waltz with great skill and inventiveness, is essentially a Nazi film stereotype – apparently civilised, suavely ingratiating, prone to little spasms of suppressed hysterical laughter which reflect a lavish sadism. This is the questionable part of the material – is Tarantino taking the Nazis seriously enough? What’s indefensible is the way he knowingly exploits the feelings of those who take them more seriously. Most of the cast of Inglourious Basterds are killed in the course of the picture (except the Basterds themselves, who mostly survive). The Nazis are responsible for a good many of these deaths – as we would expect them to be – but they are themselves murdered or maimed in particularly gruesome ways. Tarantino knows that he can rely on the audience to feel the Nazis get what they deserve: what fate could be bad enough for them? Since there’s nothing to suggest that Tarantino himself sees Nazis as anything other than screen creations, he is in effect using anti-Nazi feeling based on moral outrage in order to make his own bloodthirstiness respectable.
In the first chapter, Landa and his men arrive at the house of Lapadite, a French farmer whom they suspect of hiding Jews. Eventually Lapadite cracks, admitting that a Jewish family is concealed under the room where he and Landa sit smoking. Landa orders his men to shoot and bullets rain down through the floorboards and the gaps between them (through which we’ve earlier glimpsed the eyes of the hidden Jews, staring fearfully upwards). Just one of the Jewish family survives – a daughter, Shosanna, who runs for her life away from the farm and disappears into the gentle French countryside. In the second chapter, we’re introduced to the Basterds and see them at work, interrogating one (courageous) German soldier before shooting him and several others, who are then scalped. The one Nazi who survives is willing to tell the Basterds all they want to know in order to save his skin – although he doesn’t quite manage that: they carve a swastika on his forehead to remind him for the rest of his life who he is. In the third chapter, Shosanna reappears, now running a Paris cinema (and with a new name, Emmanuelle Mimieux); a cineaste German soldier strikes up a conversation with her one day as she’s changing the billboards. His name is Friedrich Zoller and his marksmanship has made him a national hero whose achievements are about to be celebrated in a Goebbels-sponsored propaganda film Stolz der Nation (‘The Nation’s Pride’). Zoller’s liking for Shosanna is strongly unreciprocated but, in his attempt to cultivate a relationship with her, he persuades Goebbels to hold the premiere of Stolz der Nation at Shosanna’s cinema. At a meeting with Goebbels and his retinue to discuss the arrangements for the premiere, Shosanna re-encounters Landa.
The fourth chapter is centred on a protracted sequence in a subterranean French bar, involving several of the Basterds, Nazi soldiers and officers, British army officers posing as Nazis and a German actress who’s working for the British. A double-agent actress called Bridget von Hammersmark is the only survivor of the eventual shoot-up; she’s wounded in the leg (it’s her shoe that’s left behind in the bar) and then undergoes an interrogation from the leader of the Basterds, who pokes his finger into the bullet wound – a means of applying pressure. The final chapter describes two parallel plots. Shosanna, with the help of her projectionist boyfriend Marcel, has made a film and spliced it into one of the reels of Stolz der Nation: she intends, when the screen is showing the piece she’s made, to burn down the cinema, using the vast amount of flammable nitrate film she has on the premises. The Basterds for their part plan to assassinate Hitler and as many of the high-ranking Nazis as attend the premiere with him. Landa sees through the Basterds’ (intentionally laughable) Italian disguises and has them arrested. He proposes to them a deal: the assassination of the Nazi leadership, which would put an end to the war, in exchange for – for Landa – the US Medal of Honor, and a home in the USA with a guarantee of immunity from prosecution for war crimes and full military pension. To cut a lengthy sequence short: both plots come to fruition, killing everyone in the cinema – Shosanna and Zoller (who shoot each other) and Bridget von Hammersmark (who is murdered by Landa after the shoes fits) have already been dispatched by the time the firing and the fire are underway. The action finally shifts to a forest near American lines, where the Basterds trick Landa and his driver into a symbolic act of surrender before scalping the driver and carving a swastika on Landa’s forehead.
The main trajectory of Inglourious Basterds is to bring violence to bloom in as many varieties as possible. Tarantino may feel that he earns this efflorescence through his patience in the early stages. The farmhouse conversation is gripping: you can see from Lapadite’s brimming discomfort that the Nazis’ suspicions are well-founded and you know that Landa’s silky menace, as he drinks a glass of milk (and compliments Lapadite on ‘your cows as well as your beautiful daughters’), prefigures murder, although you share the farmer’s hope that there may be a reprieve. In the third chapter, the scene in which Shosanna and Landa are left alone together – he orders a coffee for himself, a glass of milk for her – is excruciatingly tense and very well acted. This is the sequence which ends with nothing more violent than the cigarette end in the whipped cream; when Landa leaves the café and Shosanna breaks down, you register a small (but nonetheless powerful) part of her mixture of horror and relief. The suspense in the basement Paris bar is strong too – except that suspense is not quite the right word: Tarantino has shown his hand with the Basterds in the second chapter in a way that leads you to expect that any scene in which they appear will end in bloody massacre. On the rare occasions when he withholds an act of violence, it’s money in the bank to be drawn with interest. In the second chapter, we see the prelude to the carving of the swastika and the result, when the scar has (somewhat) healed, but not the act itself; that’s left for the final sequence of the last chapter.
Pauline Kael distinguished different kinds of screen violence:
‘As I see it, there are those moviemakers who use violence for a turn-on; they put you on the side of the bullies. … Then there are the moviemakers who sensitize you to what violence does to its victims. … I think it’s the job of a reviewer to make the moral difference clear and to try to make it clear that some movies – such as The Wild Bunch – blur the distinction. There are also movies that use violence for casual bang-bang effects … What I’m getting at is that violence has a whole range of meanings; simply to condemn it is mindless.’
The violence in Basterds certainly isn’t sensitising and it certainly isn’t casual. It might be said to be used as a turn-on (it’s surely experienced as such by some viewers) – although it’s not a simple matter here of putting you ‘on the side of the bullies’. The perpetrators of the violence include not only the Basterds but a young European Jewess whose family has been murdered by the Nazis – and it’s the Nazis, the epitome of malignant bullying, who are often on the receiving end of the violence in the film. The trouble is that Tarantino has too much form as a purveyor of screen violence. You don’t feel that he is (to quote Kael’s review of A Clockwork Orange) ‘sucking up to the thugs in the audience’ so much as inviting us to admire him doing what we know he likes to do. There was some laughter in the Richmond Odeon at the killings and maimings in Basterds – but that doesn’t mean the violence wasn’t graphically real: I think the laughing was largely an expression of nervous shock at the extremity of what was on the screen. Tarantino has created an ingenious plot and cast of characters but he seems to regard them essentially as opportunities to deliver a new strain of screen mayhem.
His track record made me resent too the primacy of cinema in the picture’s scheme – even though this is skilfully worked out. It’s knowing that Tarantino is a film fanatic that makes you uncomfortable about the way in which cinema transcends history in the scheme of Inglourious Basterds. When Tarantino says that he sees the film as a Western, he appears to mean that he sees similarities in the moral landscape of World War II and Western pictures. Seeing the Wild West as something that exists primarily through its dramatisation on screen may be hard to resist but recent European history which exists as documentary record on film is a different matter. Tarantino establishes the Western correspondences mainly superficially – by film references. (He uses ‘The Green Leaves of Summer’, the theme music for The Alamo, to score the opening titles; and bits of Ennio Morricone to relate the action in ‘Nazi-occupied France’ to the spaghetti Westerns which Sergio Leone shot in Spain and for which Morricone wrote the scores.) Film references naturally continue in scenes like the one where Shosanna is changing the billboards (Clouzot’s Le Corbeau is showing). The cast of characters even includes a British army officer (amusingly played by Michael Fassbender) who’s a film critic. (It’s striking how getting the profession mentioned in dispatches in this way seems to disarm criticism on the part of some reviewers.)
Tarantino makes more penetrating film connections only in order to expand the repertoire of violence in Basterds. The Basterds’ leader is called Aldo Raine (in a nod to an actor associated with macho action roles). He has Native American blood in his veins – this is the pretext for the scalping. Other ways in which Tarantino illustrates the power of cinema are eloquently clever and penetrating. After Shosanna’s been killed, she can continue to speak from the screen. The use of the stocks of nitrate film to burn down the picture house and extinguish the Nazi high command is cinema sacrificing itself for the sake of humankind. There’s a strong correlation between heroism and love of film, and the characters’ ethnicity is a part of this scheme. The Jewish cinema owner and her black projectionist are nobly self-sacrificing; even the Nazi war hero is given a leavening of humanity through his enthusiasm for international cinema. It’s as if a person’s fundamental identity is revealed in terms of their relationship to film. But Inglourious Basterds demonstrates – as much as the power of film – the omnipotence of the film-maker. Tarantino ignores history. He feels free to create a Jewish revenge fantasy even if he’s not qualified by moral concern or ethnicity to do so. The final line in the script, spoken by Raine after he’s carved the swastika into Landa’s brow, is, ‘This might just be my masterpiece’.
I’m sorry that Tarantino hasn’t made another Jackie Brown (and, from what he said in the Sight and Sound interview, doesn’t want to) partly because I prefer the acting in that to most of what’s on offer here (and, for all its brio, in Pulp Fiction). The cartoonish element of Basterds comes through largely in the crudeness of some of the playing – in parts both major (Eli Roth as the Basterds’ ‘Bear Jew’) and minor (Mike Myers as a British general). Although several of the cast are hard to decipher and he’s one of them, Brad Pitt confirms what was clear enough from Burn After Reading – that he has little talent for blackly comic characterisation: here he doesn’t go much beyond talking in an exaggerated, obviously put-on accent. On the plus side, Mélanie Laurent is impressive as Shosanna, a mixture of ardour and precocious cynicism. Christoph Waltz’s performance as Landa has already been widely and deservedly praised (he won the Best Actor prize at Cannes). He’s chillingly witty – and controlled for much longer than Tarantino deserves. Waltz’s portrait evokes other screen Nazis but he tenaciously resists turning the character into a giggling maniac (something which Sylvester Groth as Goebbels, for example, fails to resist). Waltz even retains credibility in the otherwise unconvincing scene when Landa strangles Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger). Rod Taylor makes a brief, unrecognisable appearance as Churchill.
The girl next to me in the Odeon asked her companions at the start, ‘What does “inglourious” mean?’ (Her first language was obviously not English; theirs was but they couldn’t help her.) She audibly enjoyed much of what followed and at the end she said to her friends: ‘That was wonderful. Thank you’. There was a simple finality to this – as if the film, once it disappeared from the screen, was entirely over. The girl wasn’t stupid but I doubt if she asked herself why she reacted to the picture in the way she did or what it meant to react in that way. She’s probably an ideal viewer for Tarantino – bright, shallow, addicted to immediate sensation – an addiction that the film feeds. It’s one thing to ‘lose’ yourself to the various sensual experience of cinema, another to lose your capacity to think about what you’ve seen. It’s fifteen years since Pulp Fiction but Tarantino is clearly still keen to be unconventional, to say ‘I can do conventional but I can do so much more’. You can see why he loathes the notion of making a ‘mature’ film but he’s getting a bit old for brilliant insensitivity – especially when the insensitivity is by now predictable. (Even so, this new film gave Tarantino his best-ever opening week at the US box office and, in spite of a mixed press, is turning out to be his biggest all-round success in years.) His gifts are so evident that you come out of Inglourious Basterds feeling he’s somehow wasting them – although if, as it seems, he lacks a moral sense, I’m not sure what exactly is being wasted.
24 August 2009
