Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Everybody knows Tarantino likes bad movies. And everybody is wrong. It's true, though, that he likes to mock bad movies. In his scripts, sometimes his characters talk about obscure cinematographic delights, while himself, asked to name his all time favourite movies, will mix the known wit the little seen: the western (he's a notorious fan of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, his personal favourite) and the martial arts movie, the screwball comedy and the war film. Most of them are American films; it seems you have to torture the enfant terrible Tarantino for hours in order to get one European film, and that film would be highly probable Breathless. It comes as a mistery then how this director had managed to create such a cult following in Europe, the continent Tarantino seems to know little about. Everything about him seems so context-related, every rock'n'roll tune and every movie he happens to mention seem to be almost exclusively linked with the American popular culture. As opposed to more cosmopolite directors as Scorsese, Tarantino seems to be less communicable. Is he really?
It looks like in his lattest Inglourious Basterds Tarantino wants to clarify a few facts that happen to be generally ignored: no, he doesn't watch just bad movies, no, he does like European films too, and yes, he can be more communicable. While some scenes show beyond doubt his American legacy (made clear from the first chapter of the movie by a shot in the manner of John Ford's The Searchers), the most part of it is stuffed with footnotes, hints to classic European cinema. There is a contextual reason for it: Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino's first film whose plot begins and ends in Europe and it was expected that the movie posters would show European productions. But still, Pabst and Clouzot? It cannot be just a matter of coincidence. In a way, it becomes clear that Tarantino's fifth feature film, if we ignore the segmentation of Kill Bill in two parts, it's his closest attempt to a hommage to European cinema. Of course, an indirect one, hidden under the conventions of a genre movie, in a story many times told in other Americam movies about undecover soldiers behind enemy lines in Nazi occupied Europe.
Nevertheless, Tarantino hasn't become more European. Of couse, he attended Cannes and he might have formed an eye for a different kind of audience, but his approach to the war movie genre is tipically American. Under a surface of European film posters, the major influence that Tarantino confesses is that of the European directors who exiled theselves to Hollywood because of the Nazis. In a final phrase in an interview for Time Out (http://www.timeout.com/film/features/show-feature/8395/quentin-tarantino-interview.html), who works better than any outside review, Tarantino is admiratively talking about the tragic and anxious lives of directors like Fritz Lang or Jean Renoir, adding a few American names like Douglas Sirk and Jules Dassin, and about the experiences that those directors translated into a kind of movie that seems extinct nowdays. Mostly of them are propaganda films, but Tarantino is not ashamed to place them in a higher position than any recent anti-war diatribe and of any film that injected Vietnam's painful experience into humanitarian messages. As disrespectful as Tarantino is, he doesn't add names to the list and doesn't criticize established hierarchies, but tries to give an example by doing a retro movie, and a rare kind. On the way to reestablishing a lost atmosphere in war movies, he comes vey close to being an implicit critic of a whole generation of films very well intentioned, accusing the inhumanities of conflict and loaded with messages for peace. You might say that Tarantino doesn't like good movies, then, if by that you mean conventional, tear-jerking, boring films, even if these films send the right message.
It's obvious that Tarantino grew seeing Where Eagles Dare and it's almost sure he can't stand Schindler's List. For him, the war movie must be clever concerning the dialogue, with no special effects, suspenseful and histerically funny (or, is this true for any Tarantino movie?). It wasn't very certain, by the time the very first trailer hit the Internet, that all these traits would be present in Inglourious Basterds. Because all an unpacient Tarantino fan was able to see was a warlike Brad Pitt delivering cocky lines and a grotesque Hitler, there were suspicions that it weren't, in fact, much more to see about the film. It proved totally wrong. But even that small slice of film was thrown to the public because of the fact that Tarantino was still editing the final cut, it proved to be a very clever trailer, because it's better if one watches the movie without being warned what's to be expected of it. The skeptical can compare with the second, official trailer, that makes the film look like an action feature. But, as long as Tarantino wouldn't mock himself and his style, nobody would expect from him an action movie sui generis: an invisible string connects all his movies to his debut, Reservoir Dogs. Although is a recurence in Tarantino's movies, his typical scene will always be one involving a couple of guys sitting at a table and talking. While some fans could miss Harvey Keitel or Samuel L. Jackson, hearing them narrating or over the phone in Inglourious Basterds, his fresh cast is as good as any of his regular actors. The slight difference is that Tarantino allows the characters to talk their native language, even if that is German or French. Hence, the great moments of the film belong to Brad Pitt as a comando leader as they belong to a trio of overwhelmingly talented trio of German-speaking actors as Daniel Brühl, August Diehl and Christoph Waltz, the latter stealing the show each time as a SS Officer.
It's interesting that Tarantino not only changed his usual actors, but also changed slightly his atitute towars exces; it is kown that Tarantino was into exces as much as his scripts were into building dramatic tension: Reservoir Dogs was about catchy, clever lines, but had also an ear cutting near its end. But Tarantino hasn't really changed in that departement, and Inglourious Basterds has its share of mutilation. What is less present is the overly pretentious, kitsch-like touch that Tarantino always added to his dialogues by deliberately inserting B-movies techniques. Compared to his past, in Inglourious Basterds Tarantino is unusually clean. While you may ask yourself where did the usual cuss go, it's as surprising how classic Tarantino may look and how much he probably avoided that at all costs. The first scene loaded with flamboyant, kitschy style is almost singular, along with a few funny insertions of the names of the Nazi comanders, with arrows pointing towards them or a few digresions in voive-over are rather minor incidents in a film that may show the reinvention of a new Tarantino, one concerned mostly with simplicity and rhythm. Iyou may wonder how a tamed Tarantino would survive the audiences, but Inglourious Basterds proves that Tarantino works even without all his artificial collage and maybe it does because of this lack. So, there isn't much to fear for Tarantino's sardonic grin; while he may get more calssical in tone, he becomes simpler and more complex as a director, and the single, most important question that one should be asking about him is what kind of genre movie hasn't Tarantino tried yet? Yet. Because he will surely do it, unpredictable as usual, ironic and at his best.
