Inglourious Basterds is typical Tarantino: audacious and brilliant.
It’s not very often that you watch a movie with great expectations and those expectations are met. And when the movie in question is directed by Quentin Tarantino, the anticipation is even greater. Inglourious Basterds is one such movie. And like most Tarantino movies, this too will polarise opinion. It’s amusing at times, shocking at others, while simply brilliant for the most part.
Tarantino takes us back to the 1940s, to Nazi-occupied France, where Hitler and his men are hell-bent on killing all the surviving Jews in the country. A few soldiers form a group, and call themselves the Basterds. Their aim? “To kill every f**ing Nazi”, as the leader of the pack, Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) puts it. The movie is set during World War II but it isn’t a war movie.
Inglourious Basterds is divided into five “chapters”. In the first chapter, titled,“Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France”, Colonel Hans Landa (played brilliantly by Christopher Waltz) visits a French home to smoke out a Jewish family. He kills them all except for a young girl, Shoshanna, who we later see as a French woman running a cinema hall in Paris. A series of unexpected events leads her to Landa, who massacred her family. What follows is how she plots to kill several Nazis, while the Basterds, on the other hand, are planning to do the same. All the sub-plots merge perfectly in a well executed climax.
Two things always stand out in a Tarantino movie — the powerful dialogues and the music. The dialogues in the movie are brilliant as well as audacious. Like when Waltz says, “I love rumours. Facts could be misleading. Rumours, true or false, could be revealing.” Tarantino makes conversations between two people so intriguing that you often forget the surroundings. He did this very well in Pulp Fiction, and he manages to do the same in Basterds as well.
The music, compared to his other movies like Kill Bill or Pulp Fiction, is not that eclectic, except for the wonderfully executed climax scene where you understand why Tarantino lays so much emphasis on music.
Pitt as Raine has some clever lines and does a good job. Diane Kruger, who plays a German actress but is really a British spy, has a short yet powerful role. But the man who steals the scene from under everyone’s nose is Waltz. His portrayal of a Nazi colonel is phenomenal. He is witty, polite, charming and menacing, all at the same time. No wonder that of all the actors he gets maximum screen time. He has already won the best actor award at Cannes earlier this year, and many more awards should follow.
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People familiar with Tarantino’s work will know that, although some of the characters have limited screen time, they leave an inedible mark on your mind. Most of the characters in Basterds fit that mould. Watch out for the scene where Waltz compares himself to other German soldiers. And note “The Bear Jew”, who is known to smash people’s heads with a baseball bat. He is played by Eli Roth. The actor directed Hostel, one of the goriest movies of all time, and has just three scenes in this film. But one remembers his character long after the movie ends.
Like other Tarantino movies, this one too has its share of violence and gore, yet that doesn’t repel as one doesn’t expect a movie revolving around the Nazis not to have violence in it.
Yet, it’s not a flawless movie. It could easily have been shorter than its current length of 152 minutes. You also wonder about the dairy farmer from the first chapter. Or what Mike Myers’ exact role is in the movie. Still, you overlook these minor flaws.
Watch the last scene, and I am sure you will find yourself agreeing with what Pitt’s character has to say.