Despicable vengeance

Rating: 8/10 (30 December 2010)

This is in no way a true story, though it is based on true situations. The Germans in general and the German SS in particular killed millions of Jews, one by one, one after another, or massively in their camps. And when the Jewish local band at Auschwitz was playing some music for some inner celebration of some kind, thousands were arriving on the trains and were disembarked on the platform, sorted out for shower and then cremated. The crematorium never stopped burning.
That in France, in the Resistance or dropped into the country with parachutes generally, there were units, some made up of Jews from all nations around the world, is no surprise, is no invention. That these units were vengeful and tried to make some Germans they could catch, SS or not, pay for their evil actions in suffering and torturing and all kinds of other immoral, unwarlike and despicable actions is no invention. There were at least some and maybe many.
To make a film on that very subject is not uninteresting. But does it have any interest for the knowledge of history, for the education of the younger generations, for the moral and ethical good of everyone? Certainly not. It is a film about war seen as an act of vengeance, and the film itself is an act of vengeance against people who are not there to say a word about it. Vengeance is not a good attitude. Try to imagine what the Vietnamese should say, show and even do against the French or the Americans because of the Indochina or Vietnam wars if they were vengeful.
But then why did Tarantino, a good film maker, and Brad Pitt, a good actor, decided to do that film? To follow Tom Cruise in that territory, but Tom Cruise was at least dealing with a real episode of the war. Maybe to deal with some "respectable" horror, horror that can be said ethical or ethically motivated? As for that the film is dealing with so many clichés about the sexual and brutal phantasms of standard human beings that it becomes a parade of events about which we seem to think, one after the other, how gory is it going to be? Gory, exciting, gross, disgusting? We seem to be appealed by the entry "horror" of a thesaurus. I find this film regrettable and very badly inspired.
Apart from that, the film is well done, contains a good dose of suspense or thrilling expectations, and the editing as much as the shooting (what a word in this context) are realistic enough to make us believe we are in Paris or we are in history. But it takes more than good technique to make a good film. Since the dominant point of view in the film is Jewish, I consider that this vengeful attitude in Jews is absolutely unacceptable, and I can tell you those I know and who have done something during the war, did not do that kind of horror which was more on the side of the SS for one and some resistance groups that were not exactly controlled by presentable networks: there were some freelance groups that only took advantage of the situation to loot, raid and just satisfy their death instinct on anyone who could be in their way, far from it only the Germans.
Now we are 65 years after the end of this butchery we could start in the film industry to get to a more historical perspective and not to some crazy idea that Hitler could have been burnt up with all its accomplices in a Paris local cinema by a Jewish female survivor, a black man, and the non-coordinated help of two American Jews. Or maybe it is just plain Jewish black humor. But the subject is badly chosen and that kind of humor has to be self-deprecating. It is not. Those Jewish barbarians want to appear as war heroes not as pathetic puppets in the hands of some illuminated blood-crazed scalp-obsessed guru.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID