It seems to be a trait of really great movies to combine almost irreconcilable art forms, techniques, and styles, and in doing so, introduce the audience to a whole new aspect of storytelling and style. Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds” is such a movie, and yet it tries not to look special by being rough around the corners, unpolished in places, and not using the moral high ground of most movies portraying events. of the Second World War. The script for “Inglourious Basterds”, which was written by director Tarantino himself, had been developed over many years, allowing him to polish all the details and develop its unusual story to the point that the words spoken in the screen. it seemed so natural as if there was no real script. This unique writing method allowed the actors to take their characters in any direction they wanted, but still remain true to their original backstory that was established before filming even began. This fact sets Tarantino apart from other screenwriters and allows him to do whatever he creatively sets out to do in the first place, allowing studio executives to interfere only at the very end, when the entire project is ready to hit the market. . But let’s take a closer look at the movie itself.

At the level of the film’s message, Tarantino’s cool bastards potentially confront the audience with several very serious taboo topics. Let’s mention some of them. The first issue could be formulated as the following question: Should high-level officers of conquered armies, who committed massive war crimes against civilians, be allowed to have conditional renditions (safe and legal rat channels) or should they be eternally branded? with the sign whose victory they expected? Tarantino’s Jewish bad boys prefer to knife curved Nazi swastikas on their foreheads. The second issue could also be posed as a question: since justice is seldom fair, and since the victims of World War II (the Jews in the first place) cannot be fully compensated for their losses, should victims commit revenge on their own? way? Tarantino’s bad boys scalp like Apaches and the film music supports this association by quoting and mixing music even from brutal spaghetti westerns with film music composed by Ennio Morricone. The third problem is a problem of postmodernist, playful and pseudo-historical reconstruction of the end of World War II. Here, Tarantino teases us with the fictional possibility of ending the war by killing Hitler, Goebbels, Bormann, and Goering in a movie theater (“all the rotten eggs in one basket”). After numerous unsuccessful assassination attempts on Hitler, “Painter” himself turns out to be killed by moving images in a Paris cinema? No one before Tarantino had such an idea. The fourth topic is the problem of German racism against Jews and blacks, which is actually a very good topic considering some real revivals of the neo-Nazi subculture around the world. And the fifth problem is the problem of a brilliant, intelligent, eloquent, polyglot, charming and educated serial killer in the character of SS Colonel Hans Landa, who represents here some very famous Nazi monsters who managed to escape justice. (for example, Mengele), being a caricature that finally manages to learn to use the expression “bingo!” correctly, but under rather strange circumstances. Also, Hans Landa seems to be something of a cross between the detective who lives at 221B Baker Street and Michael Dobbs’ sinister politician Francis Urqhart from his best-selling novel “The House of Cards.” Moreover, the rest of the cast are brilliantly playing many stereotypical roles that could have come off the set of any Sergio Leone movie, or even movies like “Dirty Dozen”, “Where Eagles Dare”, “The Eagle Has Landed”. , etc

Additionally, Tarantino seems to have made a movie that approaches theater quality in some physically quite static scenes (for example, while sitting at the table) that grow into a full dynamic of verbal intelligence in the performance (determining who goes to survive, depending on the accents, verbal and non-verbal errors in the mother tongue and in foreign languages, depending on the ability to destroy one’s tracks before leaving the important places, depending on the fate and destiny of each one) with fatal shots endings. Somehow, we have here a film that consists of five dramatic parts in part varied and well-known: 1) the extermination showing the extermination of the Jewish Dreyfus family “In Nazi-occupied France”; 2) introduction to the Jewish Avengers in “Inglorious Basterds”, 3) escalation of tension in “German Night in Paris”, 4) dramatic twist in “Operation Kino” and finally 5) Nazi defeat in “Revenge of the Giant”. Cara”. On the other hand, Tarantino’s film is also a film about films. It is about films that are in conflict: the UFA film production of the Third Reich against Hollywood, Goebbels against Selznik. It is a film about the critics of cinema and his books.

Nazi war hero films (for example, “The Pride of the Nation”) are opposed to the Jewish expressionist films of the 1920s in the Weimar Republic. The chiaroscuro technique of expressionist film poetics has been used by Tarantino intentionally. The verbal allusion to the Jewish bad boy called “Bear Jew” or “Golem” is part of this intertextual game in the film. Pabst is mentioned and Emil Jannings himself appears as a character in film fiction. Leni Riefenstahl, Max Linder, Chaplin’s “King Kong” and “The Kid” are also part of Tarantino’s film text. Shoshana Dreyfus, the only survivor of the entire Jewish family, collaborates with the Nazis as the owner of the German night host cinema under the name of Emmanuelle Mimieux and acquires the appearances of the supposed collaborating actress Danielle Darrieux. Furthermore, Tarantino’s film is also indirectly a film about hate propaganda films – like “The Eternal Jew” (directed by Fritz Hippler, 1940) – which have become part of people’s subconscious even in France: Perrier LaPadite He decides to betray the Dreyfus family only after Hans Landa tells his story of rats (ie Jews) bringing disease and disaster. The savior of the Jews becomes his betrayer after Landa’s brainwashing and silently, albeit tearfully, points out his location in the basement. This movie is also a movie about cutting movies, changing them with subversive new movie sequences embedded. The film material itself (nitrate film prints) ultimately becomes the most important means of destroying the entire Nazi leadership.

Let’s finally see the reception of the film. The common denominator of most early reviews of this film was the fact that they all praised the overwhelming performance of an Austrian-born actor, Christoph Waltz, professing his brilliance in playing the witty Hans Landa, while at the same time manifesting his mysterious anonymity abroad. world. However, this is not the truth. He was almost unknown to the English speaking world in the sense that he had hardly ever seen him perform. Most of his roles were for German TV movies, but he was certainly not anonymous. In fact, people would be surprised at the fact that he was considered a prodigy in his early days as an actor, in the same way that Pitt was heralded as Robert Redford of the “next generation.”

There is, however, a big difference between the two. Christoph Waltz is a classic actor, in the sense that he studied acting at the Max Reinhardt School of Drama in Vienna and at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute in New York (the same Lee Strasberg who taught Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman and most of the actors and actresses of the ’80s and ’90s, the art of method acting!) As such, Waltz, being a classically educated actor, certainly has a wider range of craft techniques at his disposal. disposition, which he masterfully implores throughout this film. Pitt, on the other hand, has evolved as an actor and carries himself with the same tenacity and charm of a young Frank Sinatra, a role he gallantly played in Soderbergh’s remake of “Ocean’s 11.” The two actors find themselves in an environment that serves as a catalyst for their conflict, designed not to tame and calm but to provoke and embellish reactions, sharpen the senses and bring to light the hidden qualities of both worlds. The film benefits from their mutual exclusivity and it’s no wonder Waltz ended up winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, putting him alongside Emil Jannings as only the second Austrian to receive this award. He will surely go down in history as the man who breathed life into one of modern movie history’s clever but terrifying antagonists, alongside Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter or Perkins’ Norman Bates in “Psycho.”