Inglourious Basterds (Review)

Quentin Tarantino’s cinematic oeuvre, which includes Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill series, has made ritualistic, exuberant violence as much an American trademark as baseball and apple pie. The legendary Tarantino effect essentially consists of lulling viewers into passive complicity with the seemingly predictable, only to jolt them out of it with the unexpected and bizarre at the most crucial moment. Inglourious Basterds is no different. But what makes this movie really stand out is the audacious, madcap retelling of one of the most controversial periods of human history, the Third Reich in Nazi Germany, done with tongue firmly and consistently in cheek.

Set in 1941 German-occupied France, Tarantino’s self-proclaimed cinematic masterpiece is about two simultaneous plots to destroy the Nazi leadership, including Adolph Hitler himself, at a propaganda film premiere. One of the plots involves the French-Jewish cinema hall proprietress Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) with a dark past and a thirst for revenge. The other involves the Inglorious Basterds, a band of American soldiers led by 1st Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), whose thick Midwestern accent and a penchant for branding his victims with a bowie knife makes him a familiar Tarantinoesque caricature. It is also a throwback to Brad Pitt’s rendering of the lovable airhead criminal in Burn After Reading (Coen Brothers), proof that this gifted celebrity actor is becoming a popular and lucrative choice for Hollywood’s band of visionary filmmakers.

For those who enjoy under-the-surface interpretations, Inglourious Basterds offers a telling commentary on the arbitrariness of human brutality. Depictions are deliberately skewed - the top brass of the Nazi military is portrayed as a group of extremely courteous killing machines, who hunt down Jews and traitors without compromising on social niceties and dinner table etiquette. The Americans, on the other hand, fumble through the film, killing, maiming and inserting bare fingers into open wounds, a far too gory prospect for the refined Swastika-clad officer so brilliantly typified by Christoph Waltz as Standartenführer Hans Landa aka "The Jew Hunter”, for which he won the Best Actor Award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Hitler himself is comically portrayed as an absentminded neurotic, and even though the bullets rain down on him in the end for good measure, we are left feeling nothing except faint amusement at a surprising climax which defies all expectations, and yet is completely reasonable within the confines of this fantastic re-imagining.

Interestingly, the Holocaust barely finds mention in Inglourious Basterds. But then, moral complexities rarely find a steady place in Tarantino’s world. However, trust him to infuse suspense and terror through a generous visual use of dairy products. Be warned - you might never look at a glass of milk the same way again.