Tarantino in top form

Rating: Null/10 (22 August 2009)

Major film critics unanimously hail this movie as Tarantino's best since "Pulp fiction", and for good reasons. While PF's ingenuity is unsurpassed, "Inglorious basterds" comes with a seasoned polish while retaining Tarantino's characteristic unpredictability.
While Nazi-occupied France provides an excellent platform for dramatic tension and espionage intrigue, Tarantino has a lot more to offer than a WWII or a spy movie. In terms of history, it is fictional fantasy or, put it more mildly, an alternative course of history in the realm of imagination. A very key theme here, however, is movie makers' love for making movies. Francois Truffaut made "La nuit americaine" (1973) about making movies, and for love of it. The culminating climax of PF is a "German movie night" attended by the top 4 Nazi leaders (including Hitler) and the plots (yes, there are 2 separate ones) to annihilate them, thereby ending the war (a welcomed alternate, fictional history). Let's back up a little.
With a retro opening ("The green leaves of summer" playing hauntingly in the background) and retro ending credits shown in the good old "dots and brackets" presentation of the 50s and earlier, this 152 minutes movies is shown in 5 titled chapters. The first two are establishing sequences for, respectively, German security chief "the Jew hunter" Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz, a Cannes award-winning performance) and American Nazi hunter from the Smoky Mountains Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt, continuing his fun-seeking roles after "Burn after reading"). So is Chapter 3, in establishing a third key character Shosanna Dreyfus (Melaine Laurent), a young French Jew who escaped 4 years ago from the claws of Landa while her family was massacred (in Chapter 1), now the owner of a small cinema in Paris. Towards the end of this chapter, the first plot thickens – to set fire on her own cinema which was to host the "German movie night" mentioned above, the event being organized by her young suitor and German war hero Federick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl). Chapter 4 picks up and completes the establishing scenes with the second plot, in which the British and Americans collaborate to plant bombs in the same event, for the same eventuality. It then continues onto the most intensely entertaining scene where double agent German actress Brigit von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) arranges a secret rendezvous in a bar between Raine and British spy Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) undercover as a German officer, which rendezvous was stumbled in by a sharp and suspecting SS agent. Chapter 5 bring it all together.
Before going to the characters, let me focus on a few special aspects of this movie. The best thing is the many individual scenes that take dramatic tension to a new height – not the blood-chilling type of tension as in the Coen Brothers' "No country for old men", but a playfully palpably tension that keeps jostling you off balance and eventually erupt into an abrupt outburst of violence. The very opening scene and the bar rendezvous scene mentioned above are the best, among many other good ones. The whole, however, is not as good as the parts. By the time it gets to Chapter 5, the movie has become so busy that it losses some of its charm.
As in many Tarantino movies, references to other movies are hurled at you continuously and you'd be a good, seasoned moviegoer if you can catch just a fraction. But even non-movie (many sub-cultural) references can be found in abundance, from Cinderella's shoes (with an ominous twist) to Sherlock Holmes' pipe (which is obviously unrecognized by Ms Manohola Dagris of New York Times, which goes to show that even the best have their limitations).
Most remarkable however, in the employment of English in an essentially foreign language (mainly French and German) film taking place in Nazi occupied France. We have seen how, in Judgment in Nuremberg (1961), German characters played by Burt Lancaster and Maximilian Schell start with German when they first appear in the movie and switch to English as a proxy language after a few sentences. In FB, the French and German characters in some key scenes switch to English because they want to converse in English, which comes across as a little awkward and even absurd. But Tarantino with his movie magic soon makes you believe in anything.
The billing of this movie in the English-speaking part of the world is very misleading. The true star is Waltz, who completely owns every scene he appears in, a most deserving Cannes Best Actor. Pitt is good, another hit in his continuing fun in seeking out non-main stream characters. Eli Roth as Landa's side-kick Sgt. Donny Donowitz does not have a co-star, or even major support role. While interesting and entertaining, it's a lesser role compared with at least half dozen other male supports that are played brilliantly by unknown (to the English-speaking world) German actors. For the women, only Diane Kruger is generally known to the average Hollywood fan. In this movie, she has a major support role for which her somewhat limited range of expressions (beautiful face notwithstanding) is quite adequate. The true star is Laurent, a beguiling mix of Shirley Jones innocence and Catherine Deneuve's sophistication. Under Tarantino's exquisite camera work, she is bewitchingly mesmerizing, especially in the last scene.