Glourious insanity – Inglourious Basterds

It is unsettling to be shown a mirror twice in a week and to not like what you see reflected in there! Midweek I saw the super serious District 9, and was confronted with the real fear of anything “alien” we all have. Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is a gloriously insane film set during WWII but with hardly any thought to the real history of the times. Just like the title, Tarantino twists history and creates a well crafted tale of cruelty, revenge, heroism that ends in an analysis of our psyche. It is a mature and coherent story or epic proportions, with the twin currents of sadism and comedy running through it. The film opens to an SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) on a Jew hunt at a French farm. Waltz is excellent as the charmingly urbane Nazi with the menace lurking in his benign gaze. His soldiers gun down the hiding family but one girl, Soshanna, manages to escape and run away.

Shoshanna later grows up to be Emmanuelle Mimieux (Melanie Laurent), a theater owner in Paris. Waltz heads the sadistic track, while the comic track is led by Brad Pitt playing Aldo Raine, a US army lieutenant, who has assembled a band of Jewish army men, the Inglourious Basterds, to go into Nazi territory and hunt and scalp Nazis! Thus is the serious holocaust type theme irreverently blended with a Spaghetti Western, and the Morricone music comes along for a fun ride! In a wink-nudge homage to the origins of these Westerns, Brad Pitt at one point masquerades an Italian stuntman, and while conversing with the Italian speaking Waltz, he has us in splits over his fumbling for words while still doing a commendable chin out-thrust Clark Gable look. The film is rich with references to films past and to cinema at large – and these are effortlessly weaved into the narrative. At one point in time Zoller, later shown to be celebrity sniper (Daniel Bruhl), asks Shoshanna if she is a fan of the German director because the director’s name is up on the marqee. Her response “This is France and here we value directors!!!”