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Why does the Anglophone Indian want to be a Novelist?
The editorial speculates on the sociological causes for the boom in English fiction writing in India today.
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Two letters responding to the editorial 'The Nation and the Liberal Polemicist' in Phalanx 3 and a reply from the editor.
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How Indian TV Channels Pitched the 2009 elections to their audiences
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| Home > MK Raghavendra |
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Review: |
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Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds
M.K. Raghavendra
Tarantino’s latest offering Inglourious Basterds is a provocative bit of filmmaking. It does not provoke at the level of ideas but is a bizarre cinematic object that resists description and categorization. Since it is perhaps the strangest World War II/ Holocaust film ever made, this review is both an attempt to ‘identify’ it and to understand why it goes seriously wrong.
The Holocaust has been a favored subject with the ‘cinema of concern’ for quite a while now. But it has been so thoroughly exploited for its emotional appeal that it seems exhausted as a subject. The last nail in its coffin - as a subject of big-budget entertainment - may have been driven in by Spielberg’s manipulative Schindler’s List (1993) and Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002). It is because the subject is so over-exploited that Tarantino’s film - in which World War II ends with a group of American-Jewish soldiers killing Hitler and the Nazi top brass - seemed just the right way to treat the subject today. America now being a majority stakeholder in the Holocaust as ‘cultural capital’, it is perhaps also appropriate for America-born Jews to be the agents of vengeance against Hitler and the Nazis.
Tarantino is a filmmaker whose films are usually cited as examples of the ‘postmodern’ in cinema. One symptom of ‘postmodernity’ is the rise of the ‘pastiche’ or the blank parody. The pastiche in cinema is a form that mimics various styles of filmmaking without mocking them and, in a successful film, different styles coexist (as patchwork) without it becoming ludicrous. Taking Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction as an example, it may nominally be a gangster film but Vincent Vega shooting himself with heroin has the allure of a chocolate commercial. The segment entitled ‘The Bonnie Situation’ could well be a film on time management. Kill Bill, likewise, uses different styles of filmmaking ranging from the spaghetti western to the kung-fu film. Another characteristic of postmodern pastiche is its disinclination to be ‘serious’ - in as much as it is playful and refuses to take a moral position.
Pulp Fiction may be playful and morally ‘blank’ but that does not mean that it lacks seriousness at all levels. It takes its own craft very seriously and it has a huge interest in character. It has perhaps the greatest ensemble performances in American film history and the actors Samuel Jackson, John Travolta, Bruce Willis, Uma Thurman and Tim Roth will find it difficult to be ever as good again. More importantly, its intricate plotting is perhaps without precedent in American cinema and even Citizen Kane looks elementary in comparison. As an explanation, rearranged chronologically, the film should end with Vincent Vega’s death at Butch’s hands - after his friend Jules leaves him - and Butch’s final triumph, when he is the one person in the film without scruples. But as the story is actually related, it concludes with Jules discovering a moral way and abandoning his life of violence. It would appear that what Tarantino is playfully demonstrating is this: there is no innate moral order in the world but a narrative may need to intervene to impose a moral order upon it.
Quentin Tarantino has been an enormously successful filmmaker commercially and is perhaps the celebrity-filmmaker of the world today. Being a celebrity is a hazard for an artist because he becomes a coveted brand of some sort. Surrounded by unthinking adulation, s/he finds it difficult to even get a measure of her/ his own worth. The most widely celebrated filmmakers of the world from Ingmar Bergman to Satyajit Ray directed their worst films in the twilight of their lives. Serious artists need to keep their ability to observe the world intact, for which they need to be ‘common people’. When artists become celebrities, they stop being ‘common’; they become, in effect, the objects under observation. When artists are under intense public scrutiny, they tend to fumble and produce imitations of their own work, and a celebrity-artist cannot retrace his/her steps and become ‘common’ once more. This is apparently what has happened to Quentin Tarantino.
Inglourious Basterds is, all told, an unfortunate piece of filmmaking although it has a stunning opening and some engrossing moments. Perhaps learning that his films are ‘pastiche’, Tarantino has produced pastiche with a vengeance. The first chapter deals with SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) questioning M. LaPadite on the whereabouts of the Dreyfus family. This is vintage Tarantino, Waltz is terrifying and the dialogue comparing Jews and Nazis to rats and birds of prey virtually sparkles. When LaPadite, in tears, betrays the Jewish family, one understands entirely. In the next chapter Tarantino changes tone and deals with the group of Jewish-Americans dropped behind enemy lines to be cruel to the Nazis. The shift is incongruous, the Americans and their associates are grotesque caricatures but one is too irritated even to laugh. The first chapter had us electrified but, instead of building upon its effect in some way, this one stifles its echoes.
The rest of the film goes on in fits and starts and one does not even become involved in the narration. Take the sequence in the restaurant with Shosanna Dreyfus, for instance. What can be purpose of having Waltz (as Landa) being overshadowed by a two-bit actor playing Joseph Goebbels? Goebbels was number two in the Nazi party but he comes across here as a harmless idiot, and undoes Waltz’s hypnotic effect upon us.
There are several aspects to Inglourious Basterds that suggest that Tarantino is virtually finished as a major filmmaker. The plotting is boring with the narrative simply divided into ‘chapters’ that call for abrupt and random shifts in mood. Tarantino appears to have even lost interest in his characters - although Nazis still seem to excite him. The filmmaker is so careless that he leaves many obvious questions unanswered: How did Shosanna Dreyfuss come to own the cinema? Why do the Allies need to recruit a ‘film critic’ to blow up a film theatre? This lack of interest in plotting and character is also made evident by the arbitrary way in which people are made to die. If there are no moral reasons for why death is dealt out, neither is there any formal justification. Tarantino is apparently so conscious of himself as a controlling intelligence that he is playing God! Isn’t he aware that regardless of the individual ‘importance’ of artists, it is foolhardy for them not to submit to the demands of their work?
Most of the narrative turns in Inglourious Basterds are like the tasteless jokes that people make when they wish to convince themselves that they are having a good time. Tarantino has always been a cinephile and this film is full of references to cinema – from the silent German cinema of GW Pabst to the mountain films of Leni Riefenstahl. There is a German actress named Bridget Von Hammersmark who is a double agent also working for the allies. Part of the plot has to with a cinephile German war hero named Frederick Zoller trying to befriend another cinephile - the escaped Jew Shosanna Dreyfus. It would appear that there is a serious subtext here hinting at the love of cinema bringing people of different persuasions together. Tarantino has always been mischievous but if he subscribes to any discernible ‘morality’, it is apparently that cinema is the supreme object of loyalty.
What I therefore find most disconcerting about Inglourious Basterds is neither that it is indifferent to history nor that the most attractive characters in it are Nazis. My disquiet is that two cinephiles like Frederick Zoller and Shosanna Dreyfus should finally kill each other. Even as he is giving us a cinephile’s rendering of World War II without taking sides, he sees it fit for two ardent cinephiles to kill each on ‘political’ grounds. Most importantly, what I find distasteful is that painstakingly collected nitrate film - with rare film classics - is deliberately burned by the cinephiles to blow up a cinema hall. Tarantino has always been indifferent to politics and morality in his films but this shows that he is now indifferent to cinema as well.
M. K. Raghavendra is the Founder-Editor of Phalanx
Courtesy: firstshowing.net
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