Cinema saves the world!
Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is a fairy tale about the cinema for people who love the cinema. The misspelling of the title tells us that these heroes are not the sharpest knives in the drawer (though Brad Pitt as the leader of the Basterds certainly wields a big one), but they have an undeniable flair for violence. Anyone who expects the movie to stick to historical fact has come to the wrong place. What we have here is cinema not as documentary or educational material, but Cinema as alternate history.
This parallel universe by the creator of Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill sticks to the basic outlines of WWII history: the Nazis have occupied France, they are led by Adolf Hitler, and they are out to exterminate all the Jews. All other details have been altered to suit the filmmaker’s purposes. And Tarantino’s purposes, we gather from his films, are to entertain, to jeer at political correctness, and to pay tribute to the B-movies and cult flicks that do not get respect from the mainstream. A Quentin Tarantino film is always a tour of the mental landscape of one omnivorous cinephiliac.
Many wannabes have tried to emulate Tarantino’s career path — educating themselves through the seemingly indiscriminate consumption of movies from every era and genre, casting nearly forgotten actors in meaty roles, and writing pages of “rambling” dialogue discussing popular culture — say, the meaning of Madonna’s Like A Virgin, or cultural differences as expressed in the naming of cheeseburgers and the choice of French fry dips. (Later, many of these wannabes would dismiss Tarantino as having “lost it,” “sold out,” or both.)
What most of the Quentin wannabes lack is his encyclopedic knowledge of motion picture history — not just the films deemed important or worthy, but those dismissed as trashy — and film language. By film language we do not just mean dialogue. Consider an early scene in Inglourious Basterds where an act of violence is shot from the top. What would seem gimmicky coming from a different filmmaker makes perfect sense here.
As for the long stretches of dialogue about old television shows or “Royale with Cheese,” they’re not there just to be “cool.” They can lull or misdirect the audience, point out other themes and motifs, or, in this film, draw out the tension to an almost unbearable degree.
Every time the charming, urbane SS Colonel Hans Landa (played by the marvelous Christoph Waltz, who deserves all the praise he’s been getting) has a conversation with another character, you nearly pee yourself with fear. And what exactly is he talking about? Milk, strudel, the correct pronunciation of Italian names. The more innocuous his statements, the scarier he is.
Tarantino constantly reminds us that Inglourious Basterds is a movie about the movies. Brad Pitt’s character, who sports scars from some failed lynching, is named Aldo Raine — an homage to the actor Aldo Ray, who saw action in World War II before starring in war movies. The double agent Bridget Von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) is an actress. Mélanie Laurent (who, Noel Orosa pointed out, deserves every one of her many close-ups) plays Shosanna Dreyfus, the owner of a movie theater in Occupied Paris. Shosanna’s fateful meeting with the Nazi war hero Fredrick Zoller takes place while she is changing the letters on the marquee of her cinema.
The cinema has been showing The White Hell of Piz Palu, the silent film directed by G.W. Pabst and starring Leni Riefenstahl. Zoller, who introduces himself as a movie fan, asks Shosanna why she includes the director’s name on the marquee when most theaters only cite the stars. Shosanna tersely replies that the French respect directors.
The choice of Leni Riefenstahl is not a casual one. After her acting career she became a director (Hitler’s favorite), and her films Olympia and Triumph of the Will helped create and propagate the myth of the thousand-year Reich. (Later, another character refers to himself as an actor in Piz Palu.)
To the filmmaker’s credit, you do not have to know any of these things in order to enjoy this movie. On the most basic level, it’s rip-roaring entertainment.
Riefenstahl spun her Nazi myths; in Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino propagates his own. You think that because you know a bit of WWII history, you know how this movie ends. Well, you don’t. Tarantino is not a historian, he’s a filmmaker: he holds up the movies as a counterweight, even a corrective, to history. And in his latest excursion, Cinema saves the world.
We know that it doesn’t, but for a couple of hours in a darkened theater, we can believe it.
Long live Cinema, and a Happy 2010 to us all.
