Inglourious Basterds ****

Picture from: screenrant.com

Inglourious Basterds is Quentin Tarantino in top form. The film is a hyper-real exploration of historical actors and consequences in Nazi-occupied France during World War II. In the opening sequence we meet Col. Hans “The Jew Hunter” Landa (Christoph Waltz in an Oscar-worthy performance), an SS officer charged to round up all the Jews hiding in France. “The reason the Führer brought me off my Alps in Austria and placed me in French cow country today…,” Landa explains to a French dairy farmer as he seeks to gain information about the whereabouts of a Jewish family, “is because I’m aware of what tremendous feats human beings are capable of once they abandon dignity.” The sequence is a deliberate exercise in brewing tension and then boiling it over, finally erupting in a climax more affecting than the finale of most films.

The film is populated by a number of archetypes. Brad Pitt plays Lt. Aldo Raine, the leader of a company of Jewish-American soldiers called the Basterds. These are the soldier-heroes. They kill and scalp most every Nazi they come by, and they do it in dramatic fashion. Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) is the dame—a Jew who passes as gentile. She runs a cinema in Paris, and her fate is intertwined with Col. Landa’s (the film’s primary villain) more than once. Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl) is a famed German soldier turned actor who endlessly flirts with Shosanna, a relationship she takes advantage of to seal the fate of more than one German.

All of these characters live in the moment. Though often described as a World War II movie, the film is far from a typical “war” movie. There is no boot camp or marching. There are no battles or dogfights. It is about people who live, breathe, kill, and most of all, talk to each other. The film is deliberately paced with long stretches of dialogue briefly interrupted by short bouts of violence. It works because we care what the characters say to each other. Pitt is in movie-star mode as Raine and Waltz is evil incarnate as Landa. But it is Mélanie Laurent who delivers a star-making role as Shosanna. Her character has the biggest arc and is the most important to the plot, and Laurent is a revelation. She can give an entire performance with her eyes.

All of the characters’ fates converge in the final chapter in Shosanna’s cinema. This last sequence is a grand set piece, naturally evolving into the film’s logical conclusion. Though it has been widely written about, I will not reveal the ending, as it is as apt and satisfying as you might expect. The film is raw yet subtle, utilizing five acts to develop the characters and then unite them in a climax befit a twenty-first century Shakespearean tragicomedy. It could be a novel, an opera, or a stage play if it weren’t so cinematic. Tarantino’s craft and storytelling ability bring together the best of all these art forms, combining structure, dialogue, blocking, editing, and music into a masterstroke of filmmaking. It will knock you on your ass and make you ask for more. The last words spoken in the film are “This may just be my masterpiece” before the frame crashes to the title card “Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino.” Apt, indeed. Inglourious Basterds is one of the year’s best films.