Adolsecent and indulgent but such fun

Rating: Null/10 (4 September 2009)

I deliberately didn't read reviews of Quentin Tarrantino's latest offering before seeing the movie, but it was clear that the ratings of the reviewers were all over the place. Since I knew that the story was centred on a ruthless bunch of American-Jewish soldiers in 1940s occupied France, I was expecting tons of violent action like "Kill Bill Part 1"; instead I found a five-chapter construction with extensive scenes of dialogue (much in German or French) making it much more like "Kill Bill Part 2". As a writer, Tarrantino gives his actors some cracking lines and, as a director, he allows those actors time to deliver them with immense style. The soldiers of the title feature much less than one might expect and the shooting comes in short but vicious bursts.
Of course, this re-imaging of the Second World War represents an utterly preposterous narrative but, if one surrenders to Tarrantino's adolescent and audacious vision of how he would have liked things to have gone, then this movie is enormous fun and, for a semitophile like me, something akin to what one reviewer called "kosher porn". There are some excellent performances - including Brad Pitt as Tennessee leader of the Basterds and Mike Myers virtually unrecognisable in a support role - but Tarrantino's casting discovery Christoph Waltz is simply outstanding as SS Colonel Hans Landa aka 'The Jew Hunter'. It may be long (two and a half hours) and it may be self-indulgent, but it is full of suspense and holds the attention throughout.
Whatever the film's scale of commercial success (and it should do well), this is a piece of auteurism destined to be a staple of many a film course since its reverence for the movies and countless allusions to specific works imbue almost every scene. It starts with the title, a corruption of the American title for an 1978 Italian B-movie, where the mis-spelling is never explained but is the first indication of QT's compulsive quirkiness. It ends with the last line of dialogue - "I think this just might be my masterpiece" - in which the director (none too subtly) is telling us something. In between, we have music from spaghetti westerns, a character who used to be a film critic, frequent references to German movies, a bar game involving a film title, a climatic scene in a cinema, and much much more.