As the summer winds to a close and we find ourselves finally able to forget the sensory onslaught of the blockbuster season (I mercifully managed to avoid Michael Bay soiling my retinas) we find ourselves facing those films languishing in cinematic purgatory. Too mature for the summer, too coarse for make the grade for awards season these are the films that lack a defined place among the social classes of high-brow and low-brow. Tarantino, it seems, has evolved over the years into a director who has consistently found himself stuck in this juxtaposition of identity. His name still carrying the intellectual kudos to impress the cinematic authorities at Cannes and western critics but with a noticeable decline in quality post-Jackie Brown which has left him appealing solely to fanboys and indeed fans of himself. It is fitting then that lack of identity is one of the largest problems with Inglorious Basterds, Tarantino’s long mused over World War Two epic centred on a team of Jewish guerrilla soldiers sent to strike fear into the hearts of German soldiers. However the story is split two ways between that of the ‘basterds’ and of Shosanna Dreyfus a young Jewish girl seeking revenge for the slaughter of her family and inevitably the two threads are destined to collide.
The largest problem with this is that not enough time is dedicated to either storyline to get the full emotional impact or entertainment value. The Basterds storyline is introduced as a typical men-on-a-mission in the vein of The Dirty Dozen or The Dambusters with Brad Pitt as the inimitable Aldo Raine. Sporting a thick southern drawl and a suspicious scar Raine is clearly another iconic Tarantino character in the making and Pitt plays him superbly. Seething with the internal anger of a man who’d scalp the gods if they crossed him and yet not once loosing his cool, not once does Pitt turn this man into a demented hillbilly parody. Instead Raine is cunning, calculated and determined to see this mission through. However Raine is the only Basterd who we get a fully rounded impression of as a character, aside from a few moments from Eli Roth’s sadistic baseball bat wielding Donny Donowitz (affectionately dubbed The Bear Jew by the Nazis) little is seen of the rest of the team. Many of the original members don’t have lines let alone any degree of character, apparently sidelined halfway through the film for the inclusion of the chillingly psychotic Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger) whose sole job is apparently to sit and look scary. Which is where the film fails as a men-on-a-mission theme, there is nothing seen of the Basterds functioning as a team, no planning of tactics, no casual background exposition. Instead of a group of individuals contributing their skills and ideas to a successful mission they are reduced to a group of faceless, killers standing in the background.
But the Basterds were never intended to be the primary focus of the film, in all the articles and features that circulated about Inglorious Basterds Tarantino always asserted that it was Shosanna and not Aldo who was the film’s central protagonist. Yet Shosanna suffers the same lack of attention that the Basterds do, first encountered briefly as she flees for her life through the fields of rural France and not seen again until the films third chapter, now living in Paris under a false identity as the owner of a cinema. As a result the audience does not get nearly enough time to empathise with her as a character at the beginning. Its only following a brutally tense session of strudel and crème with the man who murdered her family (apparently now oblivious to her identity) that Shosanna once again becomes the terrified and venerable femme fatale truly worthy of our sympathy. Yet her vulnerabilities remain concealed throughout the film as she begins to plan her revenge from manipulating her projectionist and lover Marcel to threatening an unwilling collaborator at axe point leaving her role as the emotional heart of the film slightly diminished.
Furthermore the film lacks many of the distinctive qualities we have come to associate with a Tarantino film. The lengthy tracking shots that follow the characters like a companion, the 70s exploitation style music and the scenes of lengthy character dialogue (or at least ones with characters who won’t be dead by the end of the scene). Which will not only disappoint the fanboys but also deprives the film of engaging qualities that made his earlier work so engaging and as a result some scenes do drag on. However Tarantino still proves himself as a skilled director in several scenes, more specifically displaying a skill for suspense to rival Hitchcock himself. The opening chapter for example sees antagonist Standartenfurer Hans Landa, The Jew Hunter, skilfully interrogate a French dairy farmer who may or may not be hiding Jewish fugitives. As Landa subtly tiptoes around the subject with metaphors of hawks and rats I implore anyone not to be on the edge of their seats throughout. As well as the aforementioned scene between him and Shosanna where he casually discusses the upcoming Nazi premiere over strudel, telling her to “attendez la crème” just forcefully enough to keep their friendly dessert rife with tension. Indeed if the film has one quality that redeems its other flaws it is Landa himself, one of Tarantino’s most memorable creations to date. Disturbingly creepy yet undeniably charming Landa provides the perfect foil to Aldo as a man who looks out purely for himself. His opinion on his unofficial title of The Jew Hunter changing depending on how it serves the conversation be it intimidating victims or persuading potential allies. Christopher Walz plays the character to perfection and does so with relish, giddy as a schoolboy when repeating western phrases “That’s a bingo!” or taking the piss out of the Basterd’s attempt to pose as Italian filmmakers. Comical and terrifying, complex and yet single-minded Landa is possibly the best thing the film has to offer. In the end the biggest problem with Inglorious Basterds is that you leave the cinema wanting more, as strange as it sounds for a problem. More of Tarantino, more of the Basterds and so, so much more of Shosanna the film is still entertaining but inevitably unsatisfying. By no means it is Tarantino’s masterpiece nor is it entirely a piece of shit but rather a good sign of things to come.
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