Sunday 13 September 2009

Inglorious Basterds

As the enfant terrible of nineties cinema, the now 45-year-old Quentin Tarantino’s latest pot-shot into our multiplex screens is, on paper, his most daring attempt thus far.

Dealing as it does with subject matter long dubbed sensitive of tyranny against Jews during the Second World War (especially in an avant-garde work such as this) it is a bold move from the American but his charmingly graphic cool-fests of the 1990s hardly went by without a whimper from censors either.

The titular group are a small band of American Jews who have come to war-torn France to seek revenge against the Nazis, presumably for their anti-Semitic genocide although this is never fully explained.

If it wasn’t for the swastikas, sweeping French landscapes and the menagerie of accents, this could easily be a spaghetti Western premise evident in Morricone-like opening music , a violent opening, the needless filmic references scattered throughout the script and clichéd introductions of the Inglorious Basterds’ members.

They are led by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) in an ill-advised role that sees the individual in his element as Jesse James two years ago stride about the screen with a demeanour and voice to match of a gurning idiot.

Thankfully however, Pitt is not the lead and is part of a strong ensemble, the gleaming star being Christoph Waltz as “Jew Hunter” Colonel Hans Landa, a menacing well-spoken villain, very much in the Bond-guise.

However the sprawling cast lead a film that still looks like it needs a fresh edit with some sections that neither serve a suitable plot advancers or simply lack narrative and character depth.

The glue holding the piece together is a premiere of a Joseph Goebbel’s (Sylvester Groth) propaganda film the one-man-army exploits of Private Fredrick Zoller who, without a hint of modesty, plays himself (the “romantic lead” Daniel Bruhl).

Zoller is smitten with the cinema’s French-Jewish owner (the shrewd Melanie Laurent) and has arranged for the premiere to take place in her French picture-house, an event which provides Tarantino’s problematic climax.

The fact that this film is not and never tries to be historically accurate ratchets the finely constructed tension that Tarantino is well-schooled in to a new level as no character’s fate is certain and nor is the conflict’s development.

This allows Tarantino to create scenes of Hitchcockian-like power that practically rope the audience forward onto the edge of their seats, most notably a section played out in real time in a tavern’s basement which deserves to be considered against some of Tarantino’s most acclaimed set-pieces with flowing dialogue and an arsenal of twists and turns.

However while this section and the film’s opening in a French farmhouse work well, the major issue with the film is the hatefully postmodern moral bankruptcy Tarantino brings to the fore.

This is not in the form of desperate men acting in desperate ways but requires the audience to support the Inglorious Basterds’ sadistic and somewhat psychotic violence which includes scalping and bludgeoning their victims and a blanket death-wish for anyone in a Nazi uniform.

The culminates in an initially striking scene which then appears to treat the Nazis' to their own holocaust. It is this remorseless approach which made the Nazis so horrific and it is difficult to side with any group which subscribes to a similar mentality.

This is the critical death-knell for a movie which has enough problems without this - overly long, overly referential and with a moral core that makes Mr Blonde look like Mr Bean.