(in)glorious

Quentin Tarentino's movies are events. They only arrive once in a half an eternity (though the pace seems to have picked up lately), and they always serve up something extraordinary, memorable, and positively nuts. Though I'm forever in love with Pulp Fiction, I'm looking forward to each new installment of the Tarentino madness.

Last night I went to see Inglourious Basterds, fighting the urge to paint over the misspelling that can only have been chosen to bypass profanity filters installed on computer in American public libraries. But who am I to ride the high horse? Crippling filters might be installed in the new Shepherd's Bush library that opened this week, financed with my taxes. An investigation into that subject will have to wait a little. For now, it's the movies.

Although Inglourious Basterds can accurately be described as a slasher – there are countless scalpings, stabbings, bodies torn to pieces by bullets, and torturing fingers jabbed deep inside wounded flesh – there is much more to the movie. After all, if it were only for the gore, it wouldn't be a Tarantino. In addition we get smart dialog in three languages, performed by actors to whom these languages are native; historically accurate props and context; multiple plot strands tightly entwisted, and highly entertaining acting.

The movie is set in 1944, a year before the German capitulation to the Allies. At the heart of it, at least according to the title, are a band of bastards, a gang of ruthless killers that profess to be Jews (though there's nothing particularly Jewish about them) and operate deep inside Nazi territory with the sole objective of endings the lives of as many Nazis as possible in as cruel as possible a way. Without the Basterds, there would be no gore in the movie.

Curiously, the Basterds operate in a void. For the first two hours of the movie, they never run, they never hide, and they are never pursued by German forces, though Hitler once throws a fit when he hears from a sole survivor about one of their mass executions. In a way, the Basterds are peripheral to the movie that carries their name.

Towards the end, the Basterds, through no effort of their own, become part of an outrageous conspiracy aimed at killing, in an all-engulfing ball of fire, the top four of the Nazi hierarchy and thus ending the war. The very same plan has been hatched, independently and unbeknown to the Basterds, by the owner of the cinema that will burn with a panicking Nazi party locked up inside.

The owner of the cinema, the secret focal point of the movie, is a Jewish woman who has earlier, in the first set of scenes of the movie set three years before the rest, escaped certain death when an SS patrol ferreted her family from underneath the floorboards of the French farmer hiding them. She made it to Paris, assumed a new identity, and has seen her grief turn to hatred and rage. When fate drops the chance for revenge into her lap, she acts quickly and decisively and all hell breaks loose.

The SS officer that led the patrol three years earlier also finds himself in Paris for the showdown. He is brilliantly acted, speaking German and French with infallible politeness and yet epitomizing evil. With the arrogance of an unchallenged mind, he drives his opponents to give themselves up. He needs no cruelness or violence but might just be the cruelest of all.

For the most part, the movie plays out like an overblown fictionalization of history, certainly over the top but believable in a movie kind of way. The characters make sense within the limitations posed by the plot. However, when the different strands of the movie are pulled together, when the forces unite and all barrels points towards a movie theater in Paris, something strange happens.

Slowly, too slowly for the viewer to realize, the films topples over into the farcical. Scenes stop making sense because logic has been jettisoned. The characters stop reacting to situations in the way the audience has come to expect. Continuity becomes optional and personal motivations slip. When all hell breaks loose, the script comes loose as well, and the movie isn't done justice by the nonsense that substitutes for a conclusion.

The movie is what it is. The first two hours are breathtaking, nauseating, captivating, and immensely enjoyable. The end should have been better left untold. If you're lucky, the extremely graphic violence in the beginning will drive you from your seat by the time the movie loses its bearings. You'd walk away gloriously impressed.