This Time Around, Tarantino is a Glorious Basterd
I won’t dwell on the fact that I’m not much of a Tarantino fan, mostly because that’s the kind of the claim that seems to require a few posts’ worth of explanation (and Ehren is ever-so-slowly getting me to lighten up and reconsider Tarantino’s most recent films with more of an open mind, anyway) but it’s worth noting because it serves to underscore just how much I enjoyed Inglourious Basterds. I loved it, in fact. It’s a marvel: light years beyond anything else he’s ever made, and one of the most astonishing films about film that I’ve ever seen.
Inglourious Basterds is another genre project for Tarantino, but beyond anything he’s done before, mostly because it all really means something this time around. He maps the spaghetti Western on to the war film — the WWII film, in particular — and then subverts them both, throwing out the rulebook on how filmmakers have been allowed to imagine World War II for the last half-century. It’s a creatively awesome act of destruction (risky, too) and a striking testimony to the power of movies.
All roads in Inglourious Basterds lead to the premiere of the fictional Nazi propaganda film Stolz der Nation, and the whole movie is loaded with comment on the history of film – spanning German, French, American and British filmmaking. In so many ways, Inglourious Basterds is about controlling representation and, hence, controlling the imagination. It’s no small delight to me that a Jewish-French female filmmaker takes them all down, cinematically and narratively. There are precious few movies that depict female filmmakers, and maybe none in which film becomes so powerful a destructive instrument for a woman. (By contrast, movies are full of men who use film/filmmaking to hurt and kill.) As the marvelous Shosanna Dreyfus burns down her theatre (a nice nod to that most iconic of female revenge films, Carrie), so, too, does Tarantino burn down the limits of what’s been appropriate to imagine for World War II films (and, some would say, good taste).
As a result, Inglourious Basterds is one hell of a powerful Jewish revenge fantasy, and long overdue. I expect to see a body of critical literature popping up about this in the years to come, and I’ll be glad to see it. Like it or not, violence and subjectivity are inextricably linked in the language of movies, and the power of imagining bloodthirsty, revenge-bent Jews taking down the Third Reich deserves a lot of attention.
[I have my own film revenge fantasy about Inglourious Basterds, too. In my fantasy, it earns a Best Picture Oscar Nomination, much to the surprise of the Academy, who are forced to acknowledge that Inglourious Basterds is far more worthy than grotesquely, reprehensibly sentimental films like Life is Beautiful. Blarg.]
Inglourious Basterds is far from perfect. Tarantino does his requisite showboating, a few scenes could stand to be jettisoned altogether, and he woefully miscasts director Eli Roth. (I like Eli Roth quite a bit, but in a film full of amazing performances, his stunning inability to act is actually pretty painful.) (Speaking of great acting, Inglourious Basterds is full of it. Christoph Waltz is pretty much superhumanly good as Col. Landa, and props to Brad Pitt for actually pulling off Aldo Raine. Also terrific is Melanie Laurent, Diane Kruger, Michael Fassbender, Mike Myers in a remarkably restrained cameo, and Denis Menochet will break your heart as the French farmer Perrier LaPadite.) Yet, it’s nearly impossible to not forgive Tarantino his excesses on Inglourious Basterds, because I can’t imagine how he could have made such an ambitious, audacious picture without indulging some of them. Yes, yes, it’s definitely worth it.
Oh, and one more thing: the opening moments of the film’s final chapter, in which Tarantino puts Shosanna’s preparations for the opening of Stolz der Nation to David Bowie’s Putting Out the Fire with Gasoline (yes, the Cat People theme song) is one of the most breathtaking moments of film I’ve ever experienced.
