As the above poster testifies, this is Tarantino’s most personal film yet – you don’t even need the title, just his name! (Okay, that decision was probably made for this tube poster due to the possibly offensive actual title but still, it’s pretty telling of the film itself.) The film is a virtual stand in for the man himself and his pre-occupations (which might put off some) what with the conversations about obscure movies, the dismantling of macho mythology, the assent of the empowered female and more than anything else the depiction of how films are made and exhibited.

But let’s be clear. Inglourious Basterds. If you don’t love this film, you don’t love film. It’s that simple. This is pure cinematic heroin of the highest order. I came out of the cinema reeling from so pure a hit. I found it a very disorientating experience. I haven’t reacted like this since seeing ‘There Will Be Blood’. And although the films are thematically and stylistically opposed, they both share some fundamental essence. Time and space as we know it (especially as we know it in film terms) get thrown out the window. Both films are massive, immersive epics that at the same time deal in microscopics, scenes play out in overwhelming length and detail, a dream like stasis is achieved only to be periodically blown apart by geysers of kineticism. I found it most apt to hear in this interview Tarantino talking of his admiration for TWBB and that he considers PT Anderson the peer to beat.

Tarantino is drawing inspiration for this technique more directly from Sergio Leone, whilst Anderson was feeding off Kubrick. He’s taken Leone’s approach to the set-piece (a long, slow build-up of tension crescendoing in a moment of abrupt violence) and taken it not only to the extreme but applied it to the micro and macro levels of the whole film. So that the film basically consists of a handful of long, tense scenes each climaxing with some violent catharsis and the film as a whole does the same thing, feeling like one, rising build-up to the mother of all climaxes. It’s incredibly effective and affective. This is the first film of his where I’ve laughed out loud and been brought to the verge of tears, constant emotional gearshifts that in this age of inert, pre-processed fodder, feels like real shock and awe.

And yet the film certainly isn’t perfect, whatever that means. There are dissonant notes struck along the way but any minor quibbles are washed away by the euphoria of the whole. I also have the sneaking suspicion that Tarantino is purposefully hitting the occasional wrong note. After becoming a household name with his first few films, so perfectly capturing the zeitgeist (or did it capture him?) that he ran the risk of becoming totally co-opted by the wider culture. His identity was no longer his. He went into virtual hiding and didn’t make a film for six years, re-emerging with the Kill Bills and a new aesthetic. After being canonized with just a couple of films, what else could he do to stop himself ossifying other than actively torpedo his own work? He doesn’t want to be an elder statesman of cinema, universally accepted and thus irrelevant. He often speaks of retiring when he’s sixty so that he doens’t end up like one of those directors who should have stopped while they were still hot. He wants to be the perpetual enfant terrible because the other option is being the inert relic, admired but not blowing minds. And man, that’s just not cool. (Pesonally, I hope he doesn’t retire at sixty and I think many directors continue doing great work to the very end, Welles, Kubrick, Leone, Ophuls etc.)

So, like, what’s the film about? It’s about film. It’s not about WW2, that war just provides the lexicon for the discussion. The real battle being fought is the war on film. The critical heat the film’s been getting is baffling and disheartening – that so many critics could be blind to the most heartfelt and touching love letter to cinema since ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’. Nowhere else does one get schooled so well in the history of cinema and in the production and projection of cinema. In years to come, when everything’s gone digital and perhaps even cinema houses themselves become obsolete, this film will be seen and people will learn of and yearn for the days when a beam of light shone over a crowd of strangers in a darkened room, nitrate frames blown up to terrifying sizes, an era when stars still had faces.

(I’ve purposefully avoided revealing too much about the film, just go see it already. Some spoilers follow, so read the rest after having seen it.)

Feminists really need to get their shit together and get behind Tarantino. He’s their best bet in Hollywood today. IB continues his mission to tear apart cinematic male mythologies and replace them with some kind of female ubermensch. The supercool gang of pals at the start of Reservoir Dogs are revealed to be untrustworthy, psychopathic and ultimately unknowable. The mythical Bill turned out to be an annoying old man, no epic kung-fu showdown required, his killing was pure domesticity. The badass slasher killer of Death Proof turned out to be a whimpering pussy, no match for the film saavy group of hot chicks. And in IB, the men-on-a-mission stuff is just a front to draw you in only to reveal that the Basterds are really a bunch of inept sadistic Yahoos and that the real hero of the piece is actually a heroine – a beautiful, smart, sincere, focussed French heroine who is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice but doesn’t lose her humanity in the process.

This heroine, Shosanna, could be seen as Tarantino’s alter ego, his anima made flesh perhaps. Like him, she uses cinema to blow away the audience, to blow away history and therefore the rules, making good on Hitchcock’s threat to put a bomb under seat of the spectators. It’s no coincidence that the cinema gets blown up, while showing a (within the context of the film) historically accurate war film which Shosanna/Quentin has sabotaged with their own take on movie/history, while the film maker of said war film, Goebbels, is in the auditorium, with the most important critic, Hitler, also in the house. The terrorist film-maker has the last laugh on them all as the movie lives on after they and even him/herself are dead. Surely this whole sequence is Tarantino’s rebuttal to all critics of Basterds lack of reverence to real history and war movie history.  He gives us the ending that every other WW2 film wishes they could have given us but couldn’t because they were too busy making Nations Pride. Quentin had to destroy cinema in order to save it.

Tags: Leone, PT Anderson, Tarantino

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