BY Kyle R Willis

“Who knows where to even start to describe anything by Quentin Tarantino?” I muse to myself as I set out to review the latest release by the celebrated director, “Inglourious Basterds”. How can I sum up a film that has taken this man over 10 years to write in a simple review? Well I’ll show you. Let’s go for a walk, shall we?

The movie opens with Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) arriving at a French dairy farm in the amiable enough interrogation of the farm’s owner, Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet). The back and forth of rhetoric of Landa, who is polite and well mannered and an unwitting Perrier is remarkable. The light mood graduates to tense in a fascinating attenuation. Engaging in a round of discourse, the dialogue spans French, German and English. A tug of war between banter and repartees, this conversation, we come to find, is a chess game, as Landa makes it suddenly apparent that he is certain that the LaPadite family is harboring Jews beneath the floorboards. Landa draws a confession from LaPadite with the ease of an indifferent snake charmer. The awkward and uncomfortable discussion between these two is truly something that only Tarantino could have formulated. The troops are invited inside of the home to exterminate the family. Only a teenage Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent) is allowed to escape; an endowment of freedom the reason for which is shrouded in ambiguity and continues to itch at the back of your mind throughout the film. The demeanor of a subtly shrewd and sadistic Landa is set, making him a daunting figure throughout the film.

The tale then follows a squad of Jewish-American soldiers who are sought out to join the ranks of an elite group of Nazi hunters who, led by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), make it their mission to strike fear into the hearts of the German Nazi forces. Calling themselves ‘The Basterds,’ the gang cuts a swath through Nazi occupied France, taking no prisoners. Their tactics include brutally dispatching of and then scalping their enemy, as well as carving the swastika in the forehead of those left alive to spread the word of their existence. Their plan is spoiled, however, when a firefight leaves the Basterds shy of every man who could fluently speak German, a guise which they had planned to utilize to aid in their effectiveness.

Some time after the murder of her family, Shosanna – under the camouflage of a new identity as ‘Emmanuelle Mimieux’ – is operating a cinema in Paris. She meets and immediately becomes the object of affection of Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), a marksman whose exploits in the German army are to be celebrated in a Nazi propaganda film, Stolz der Nation (Nation’s Pride). Zoller, ever the charismatic, urges Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) to hold the premiere of his film at the cinema owned by Shosanna’, bringing her and her theater unwelcomed and unwanted attention. Seeing that the premiere has taken on a life of its own, and that high-ranking German officials will be in attendance Shosanna finds a diamond in this coal mine of a situation and plans to exact her revenge on those who killed her family. With the help of employee, Marcel (Jacky Ido) and some highly flammable nitrate film, Shosanna readies her intentions to burn down the cinema as the show gets underway.  The movie is a fanciful journey through World War II, a quixotic safari through a story that you are sure you know the ending to, yet you find yourself questioning history by the 4th chapter. Tarantino takes his artistic license for a joyride through a vivid mise-en-scène in this ungoverned war movie; taking this piece of history, chewing it up and spitting it out at the audience with an intense vulgarity and an artistic license driven departure from a storyline we all undoubtedly know. It is an impudent rewriting of history, some would speculate that this is Tarantino’s attempt to use the platform of filmmaking to offer a chimera through which to distort our interpretation of factual history and actuate the abstract. Don’t expect to be bored at any point in this film, the mood is oft thrown in a new and different direction, but there is always something going on.

Pitt is extraordinary, serving up a heavy portion of hyperbole to bring his audacious character to life. Christoph’s acting spans the satirical and the dramatic. His ability to convey his character as simultaneously charismatic and abhorrent leaves you on edge. Hitler himself (Martin Wuttke) makes appearance donning a cape, in pure comic book fashion; arriving on the scene the obvious villain, presented as both serious and ridiculous. Not many know that this film is, in fact, a remake of a 1978 movie of nearly the same name, “Quel maledetto treno blindato” (the title literally translates to “That Damned Armored Train”). Remaking a film is an art form and can easily go awry. If you mindlessly follow the movie you are remaking, then you are bland and unoriginal. If you bulldoze the original script and build your own new and different story then you are accused of leaving fans of the original crestfallen. I believe Tarantino found a middle ground that pays homage to the original, while completely eclipsing it in every possible way. Inglourious Basterds should please every fan, past and present, of this fictional WWII saga.