Another Tarantino classic

Quentin Tarantino understood early that movieland was the only kind of life he wanted. In that sense, he’s like a lot of us who know that this world is not quite up to the mark, so we need to escape it the best way we know how. Tarantino is the best way we know how. He’s manic and clever and gives his audience just what they need. You don’t watch Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill or Grindhouse or Inglourious Basterds without thinking about it for days, months, years after. If that isn’t the mark of genius, I don’t know what is.
Inglourious Basterds’s opening scene is an instant classic. There is a bucolic image of the verdant French countryside where a man is seen in honest labour, chopping logs and a young girl is hanging up the washing. A car comes up the winding drive, inside are three men in uniform. As the car comes to a halt, you see the men are in German uniform, are in fact Nazis, and the watcher’s adrenalin notches up. This is the beginning of an agonizingly slow build-up of terror that ends, as expected, badly.
The sole survivor of the Jewish extermination in microcosm, Soshanna, goes on to work in a cinema house in France. The mark of the beast is seen on her face, devoid as it is of feeling. But when she learns that Hitler and his crew will attend a premiere at her theatre, she comes back to life and plans murder with relish. In this she has unknowingly become part of a parallel plot, one spearheaded by the Basterds, men who hunt Nazis for sport. The opening scene is invested with so much human emotion that you would think everything else will be an anti-climax. Not in Tarantino’s hands. It is, instead, the start of an almost 3-hour extravaganza that fulfills all our secret desires. When it comes to making a great film, it’s all about the director - look at the debacle of Twilight. Here, Tarantino has got the most compelling performance from every one of his players. Diane Kruger makes up for Troy with a mean, tough spy persona whose death is as terrible as the times; Brad Pitt continues his comedic streak after the marvelous Burn After Reading (his white jacket scene before the climax is hysterical) and Christoph Waltz as the SS maniac Max Landa (the Who? you’re asking in your mind you never will again after Waltz wins the Oscar next year) mingles hilarity, horror and self-seeking to the point that mad though he is, you miss him when he’s not onscreen. Rod Taylor’s few minutes of screen time as Winston Churchill is invested with all the power the WW2 hero embodied and Melanie Laurent (who apparently screamed on the streets after being told she was in the movie) as Soshanna is vulnerable, steel-cored and unforgettable.
There’s been a lot of talk about the title of this movie. A slurring of reality, sometimes a spoof, sometimes a comic strip, that’s what’s in a name. When QT misspells the title, we need to figure out why; this is what the director wants us to do when he says it’s just his way of spelling it, or that it’s his homage to Basquiat.
The script is vintage Tarantino, long dialogues that keep you straining so as not to miss a nuance, that allow the characters to luxuriate in their skins. It’s no surprise that Inglourious Basterds has made four times what it cost.