Inglourious Basterds

I went to see this film spontaneously last Thursday evening, not knowing a thing about it but rather just tagging along on a cinema trip with my flatmates. I don't often go to films that I haven't read up about first, and it was actually quite a nice experience not to have any expectations of enjoyment or knowledge of the storyline.

Inglourious Basterds is the latest work of Quentin Tarantino, and tells the story of Lieutenant Aldo Raine and his mini army of Jewish soldiers, the Basterds, in Nazi Germany, 1944. According to Empire, Tarantino has been talking about his WW2 action movie for nearly a decade; it has finally hit our screens with Brad Pitt taking the role of Aldo Raine, and the film providing for us a violent fairytale in which the ending of WW2 is completely reimagined by Tarantino so that cinema itself plays the principal role in bringing down the Nazis.

In true QT style the film is very dramatic in all aspects: use of close-up 'peering-through-one's-fingers' violence, striking music, the way it is shot and especially here the ostentatious use of language, carried off in a markedly expert manner by the character Col. Hans Landa aka "The Jew Hunter" (Christoph Waltz), who speaks a total of 4 different languages with comfortable ease throughout the picture.

My favourite scene takes place in a restaurant, where Landa comes into contact with Shosanna - a girl from the Jewish family he suspects of hiding in a French house under the floorboards at the start of the film, 3 years ago. He succeeded in killing the rest of her family, but she managed to escape and fled to Paris where she now owns the cinema that is to go on and destroy the Third Reich. In the restaurant we are not sure whether Landa recognises Shosanna, which causes a huge amount of tension that continues to build up throughout the scene with help from the fast, sharp, close up shots and flashbacks that are used. At the end of the scene, Landa looks at Shosanna and says to her, leaning close with a very uneasy sense of knowing, 'You know, there is one more thing I meant to ask you... but I just can't remember what it was.' And with that the camera zooms straight in to where he stubs his cigarette out on his apple strudel (which is a Jewish dessert), and which for me strongly symbolises Landa's horrific killing of Shosanna's family in the first scene.

I won't ruin the rest of the story for those that haven't yet seen the film (!) but I can certainly say that it is worth its full 3 hours of your time. It is a long film, but with so much to keep the audience entertained you will not be fidgeting in your seats checking to see how much time there is left! Inglourious Basterds is currently showing at cinemas now and you can view the trailer here.