USA/Germany
written and directed by: Quentin Tarantino
starring: Mélanie Laurent, Daniel Brühl, Christoph Waltz, August Diehl
seen: 14th February, 2010 - comment upgraded: 11th February, 2018
Okay, so I keep re-watching "Inglorious Basterds" in hopes of finding out if I like the film or not. And the one that makes it so hard for me to decide is no other than Mr. director himself, because he balances every great thing about the film with two anti-great. He came up with his very own template for making films and now he just keeps filling and re-filling it and he will do so until the hell freezes over, I suppose. And the films are ironically more and more empty each time he does that. "Basterds" are very closely nearing it being untolerable, and because I am a traveller from the future, I know that it's only gonna get worse. Just as Lord Voldemort damages his soul each time he kills someone, thus becoming less of a human and more of a monster, so does Tarantino with every repeated, unbearably endless, not so funny and not so necessary monologue of one of his characters lose a bit of his reputation as an innovator and ingenious rehasher I once thought he was.
Recycling storylines and stylistic and musical themes from earlier films is overall a disease that "Basterds" are plagued with through and through. Maybe it's because he wrote the script through the years he worked on another projects, but that does not excuse the final feel of unoriginality. When I hear the music he put together with the Bride fighting the Crazy 88 or when I see a new parent using his new status during negotiations for his life, I am more annoyed than anything else, despite finding other moments of the film great.
And just when it seems I'm done blaming him for doing the same things over and over, I am going to say that there is one thing he didn't repeat and I almost feel like should have tried it, because this concept seems more interesting to me than the result we ultimately got: And that is his original plan which was, just as in "Kill Bill", to cut the whole story in two parts differing in tone, themes and style, and more complementing each other rather than needing each other. (But only if he had enough material to fill both parts with adequate content and not just wanna-be-cool ballast.) Because by not doing that, he got one film invisibly split in unequal parts that don't stick together very well and that is frackin' frustrating.
First of all, the film does look a lot like a rough cut of a much larger thing and that there was a lot more planned than what we got to see in the end - but the characters seem to know it happened and they suppose the viewer knows it too. But mainly, it creates the weird discrepancy between the main characters and the real and supposed influence they have on the story. Oh yes, I'm pulling out the good old argument that if the titular Bastards weren't in the film, not that much would have changed. Now I want to mention that I'm a big fan of film-makers giving the finger to handbooks and rules and doing whatever they want (and whatever their film needs to work out in the end). When it comes to Kill Bill, for example, I don't mind at all that Tarantino's jumping around like a happy kitten, showing us origin stories of side characters that don't matter all that much in the "main" story - because the mosaic fits so well in the end and there is no feeling of something being forced, false or barren, it makes sense by the logic of reason and emotion as well. "Basterds" don't give me this satisfaction.
I consider Shoshanna to be the main character of this film. It is her fate that gives structure to the whole thing. And the film tends to treat her a like a main character. For a while. I love how she keeps being forced to react to unexpected and brutal strikes from the strange and unknown. I very much love how the character of Fredrick Zoller works and operates and how brilliantly Daniel Brühl savours bringing him to life. And I simply adore how Tarantino uses the media image of them both to bring their story to a bitterly triumphant end. But Tarantino also wants more and more or maybe he got bored with only having one main story in his film so he keeps going even after what seemed like the perfect ending to me and suddenly decides that Bastars and Landa are the stars here and jumps with them to end the film on a different note, in a different place and also in a different genre altogether, and that's just a gargantuan disappointment for me. And just as final insult ment especially for me, crouching under the big screen in the dark, Tarantino cannont contain himself and has to utter the final remark about this being his masterpiece. Well, you know what, you nasty boy, it does not work for me, it does not. This film lacks the metaphorical suitcase emiting golden shine, so you can only dream on about this being a masterpiece at all.
P. S.: Out of the many, many situations in this film designed as exercises for actors to layer their abilities to show and hide just how much do their characters really know and don't know, what they play as actors and what they pretend as characters and so and so, I've decided to specifically mention Mélanie Laurent and August Diehl, because their performances are the best of the bestest.
