Here in the Church of Postmodernism, it has been a busy time, what with Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice hitting book shelves just as Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, the director’s 15-years-in-the-making WW2 epic, goosesteps into a multiplex near you.
As ever, our Dear Leader – turn the oceans into ink and there will not be enough to write his praises – is playing at T.S. Eliot. Basterds offers up its own academic back story: the medium - a raging, Aldrich-inspired war flick composed with notes from the spaghetti western - is almost message enough.
Properly speaking, of course, this a macaroni combat film, a lesser-spotted, primarily Italian beast from a genus that includes Churchill’s Leopards, Five for Hell and, indeed, Enzo Castellari’s Inglorious Bastards, from whence Mr. Tarantino derived around a fifth of the plot and a poorly spelled title.
For folks with less devotional feelings toward the man, Basterds will undoubtedly be hailed as a return to form. The director’s most accessible film since Pulp Fiction keeps the reference points on the down-low. The codes and ciphers designed to induce a giddy frisson in the Tarantino enthusiast are worked invisibly into a five-chapter structure: gags about Edwige Fenech do tend to sail over mere mortal minds, but rarely so imperceptibly.
The chapters unfurl as taut, Pinteresque playlets set primarily against the chaos of Europe in the days after the Normandy landings. In Once Upon a Time in Occupied France, Christoph Waltz’s terrifying Jew Hunter interrogates a peasant farmer to mesmerising effect. Chapter two introduces the Basterds, a maverick Jewish-American unit operating behind enemy lines under the command of a scalp-hungry half-breed played by Brad Pitt. The British enter the fray during Operation Kino, a remodelling of Reservoir Dogs’ Mexican stand off featuring Diane Kruger’s Nazi starlet and no less an actor than Michael Fassbender channelling no less an actor than George Sanders.
These bold, masculine trajectories are counter pointed by the film’s cineaste heroine, a proto-Lotte Eisner (Melanie Laurent) with scorched earth plans for Hitler and Goebbels. Indeed, there’s something of the rape-revenge cycle about Basterds’ trajectory and Tarantino - never a man to let mundane realities stand in the way of movie making - takes great care to play fast and loose with history.
This is, after all, a film featuring Gollum-inspired supermen and David Bowie’s ‘Cat People (Putting Out Fire)’ on the soundtrack. The ending doesn’t have to be correct, it only needs to be right. Outstanding.