INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

DIRECTOR: Quentin Tarantino

CAST: Brad Pitt, Diane Kruger, Christoph Waltz, Melanie Laurent, Daniel Bruhl

RATING: *****

Quentin Tarantino has called this a war film in the style of spaghetti westerns, of which he is a great fan. But, really, despite the incongruous spelling, despite Brad Pitt, despite Tarantino and despite it being based on World War II, Inglourious Basterds is one of the director’s quietest films.

Rare is a “war film”, if you call it that, where the greatest scenes are the ones with all the lead characters sitting down. In true Tarantino tradition, they talk and talk, often across a table, and we can’t stop listening. Remembering this is a Tarantino film, we expect conversations to end in blazing guns and flying body parts, and that’s the beauty of it: every scene is laced with the possibility of violence, and without getting into it, every scene ends with that possibility very much alive.

Most of the publicity has focused on Pitt as Lt Aldo Raine, leading a group of Jewish Americans behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied France. They spread terror among German soldiers by brutally killing as many as possible, scalping them and sparing one to go back and tell the story. He returns with a Swastika branded on the forehead. Raine has a target for his men: 100 Nazi scalps.

However, the film opens with and is as much about a Jewish girl, Shoshanna Dreyfus (Laurent), who is witness to the massacre of her family by The Jew Hunter Col Landa (Waltz) of the SS. In a film that never ceases with surprises, the biggest revelation is Waltz as the dreaded Landa. With his small smiles and big laughs, his curious pipe and the absurd white gloves hanging from his belt, he is one of the most fascinating characters.

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