""Inglourious Basterds,"" the latest film directed by Quentin Tarantino, is obviously designed to provoke strong responses; so far, it has certainly made good on this objective. Depending on who you ask, the film is either morally reprehensible or an idiosyncratic tribute to the power of cinema. But perhaps it's most useful to think of the film as a stage in the development of Tarantino's style: ""Basterds"" is highly allusive, remarkably unsubtle, formally bold and insanely well-written.
One thing ought to be made clear right away: Gratuity is definitely the name of the game here. Though ""Inglourious Basterds"" contains lots of graphic violence, it's usually handled so cartoonishly that any cruelty or malice is effectively softened; this generally holds true until the film's climax, a hellish massacre whose scale and brutality are unparalleled in the history of cinema. The scene in question comes very, very close to ruining the tapestry Tarantino and Co. spend the preceding 140 minutes weaving. It's difficult to imagine anyone with a low tolerance for carnage even considering watching this film, if only for these few minutes of spectacular unpleasantness.
The question of whether a fictional ""revenge of the Jews"" is cathartic or tasteless seems beside the point, as ""Inglourious Basterds"" makes no effort to present itself as anything more than a grab-bag of Tarantino's personal cinematic fantasies (as romantic and twisted as those fantasies may be); in other words, like all works of art, there's much more going on here than just the moral dimension. With ""Inglourious Basterds,"" Tarantino proves that he's one of cinema's bravest (and most shameless) artists: As with his previous work, one really gets the sense that Tarantino (who, for the record, is not Jewish) is making his subjective life public property. For many viewers, his vision is bound to seem insensitive if not completely vile, particularly when the film revels in the messy art of revenge. Perhaps it's best to approach ""Inglourious Basterds"" as though it were a voyage into the director's imagination rather than anything even superficially faithful to history, because frankly, this film might as well be set on another planet.
Regardless of how morally odious his views on revenge seem to be, it's necessary to establish a few things about Tarantino as a writer and director. First, his dialogue is amazingly fluid: Lost in much of the discussion surrounding ""Inglourious Basterds"" is the fact that the film is extremely, engagingly chatty. Second, Tarantino's pictorial compositions are striking: The antagonistic play of dark lighting and harsh colors, the active yet steady camera movements and the painterly framings prove that when it's not drenched in gore, ""Basterds"" is a visually intoxicating film. Finally, Tarantino is the rare director who seems to remain convinced that cinematic form must be reinvented with each film: The use of self-conscious narration, half-kidding transitions and unrelenting allusion yields a work that is both textually and texturally dense. It's a slight disappointment that Tarantino resorts to continuity editing when it seems he could've easily dreamt up a more unique method for assembling the film's dramatic action; however, the narrative slickness of ""Inglourious Basterds"" is at least partially due to this same formal decision.
Though an especially hammy Brad Pitt is the biggest name and hunkiest figure involved with ""Inglourious Basterds"" (and Eli Roth is the most obnoxious on-screen presence), the MVP of the film is Mélanie Laurent, who plays the quietly vengeful French Jew and cinema owner Shoshanna Dreyfus. Indeed, if the entire film had consisted of Shoshanna's story and nothing more, ""Basterds"" would be Tarantino's greatest work. This may very well be a lazy comparison but Laurent resembles Catherine Deneuve in the 1960s, which is an indirect way of saying that she's astonishingly gorgeous and deceptively volatile. Thus, she's perfect as a character that hides throughout the film, first beneath the floorboards of a dairy farmer's cottage and then in the broad daylight of Nazi-occupied Paris, quietly hatching an absolutely implausible assassination plot targeting Hitler and Goebbels.
Much, much more could and should be said about ""Inglourious Basterds."" It's the most perverse fantasy you're likely to see in 2009. There's a very definite point at which the film crosses the line, but until then it's a tremendously smooth and engrossing two-and-a-half hours. It's unclear whether Tarantino has sufficiently demonstrated that cinema is capable of vindicating modern history's greatest tragedy; only time will tell.
