Veiled in movie-blood red.
by Ryland Walker Knight
Despite a plethora of scintillating and smart pre-release reviews from a number of friends, I wrote a little something about Inglourious Basterds for Danny over at The Auteurs Notebook after I saw it Friday night. Today, you can click here to read it. It's a pretty damned insane movie, ballsy and self-immolating and, it seems to me, very personal. I didn't touch on this in the review, but somehow this stretched canvass feels even more personal than Kill Bill, though it springs from similar source: QT loves his women. More specifically, he gives Mélanie Laurent one of the most romantic moments of his career, kissing her black lover (Jacky Ido) goodbye; likewise, Ido's cigarette flick farewell is surprisingly tender. Also worth noting here is that I'm as tired as anybody of the "everything is cinema" refrain, but, if you start there (not end there), you can see that there's a bigger argument at play. It just helps that cinema is a perfect venue to talk about the things Tarantino is obsessed with: women, identity, action, the illusion of agency, the cost violence can rack up on a soul (or not), feet, performance, language and color. I really wanted to see the picture again before writing about it (I may go tomorrow), but it was fun to jam on it and bust out some quick reactions. I hope you like it, too.
Some reviews I dig: After Hoberman's mini gauntlet in the Voice, Karina Longworth's reappraisal at Spout, Koresky's enthused Reverse Shot piece, Eileen Jones' halfway there golf clap at Exiled Online, Manohla Dargis' three-quarter counter case in The Times, Walter Chaw's rapture at Film Freak Central, and a couple by Glenn: first and second. Also, in case you loved that Bowie interlude, too, give it a listen over here.
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You make me want to love this, Ry - great review. That "fuck you" still unsettles me a week later, though. The movies are always serious, always part of life, always part of history (sometimes more so when they're not trying to be). I've tried to get past it, but can't help thinking that Rosenbaum is onto something - Tarantino is so good at constructing scenes & filming the rhythm of people's talk here that I wish he'd invested in something more than a vicious exercise in amorality...
ReplyDeleteGot home from a second viewing. Did a quick look at the comments at The Auteurs and I see I disgusted David Ehrenstein. I can understand that, but I think it's fruitless. Ditto the Rosenbaum thing. How can a canny dude like Tarantino make a propaganda movie and be considered the same as Goebbels, whom he kills on screen? QT is a film critic, too. I still think my review applies to my deeper ambiguity about the picture, despite its excited tone and 4-star rating (a necessary evil), but I could just as easily have given it 2 stars and written the same review. It boils down to pleasure, I suppose. I'm probably generous to a fault in a lot of arenas, not just with the movies, and I think that kind of borderline fantasyland practice can make things confused. On the flip side, I can't deny that I grinned a lot, and straight up dug a lot of what I saw. If that means I have no taste, so be it. But I think the foul-ness of the picture is apt. I think its gravity is earned due to the strength of its mise-en-scene and its conversations. It's a goof, but it's serious. It's seriously upset with how the movies have rewritten the record of that war into a victim-fest. This is a little naive, maybe, but I guess I dig the impulse to own the anger. Also, wish fulfillment can be fun! At the same time, Shosanna and Zoller fuck with bullets, and this says something about QT's sense of isolation. Serious madonna-whore bullshit at play. He's got some fucked up goggles, to use a friend's term. But he _does_ love her; he even loves Zoller. What's fucked up is that he enjoys robbing life as much as giving life. His images burn with light, which is synonymous with life and love for me, I suppose, so Shosanna's death (money) shot is pure affect splatter. It's the opposite of Marvin's brains, tho: this ain't no joke. It's operatic. It's hurt flying everywhere, it's romance spent. But, of course, her material ghost (zing!) gets the last laugh (zing!) in a vapor, rising, while our sanctioned memories get torched. That isn't denial, tho. Flip that: it's admission. The "fuck you" is to wallowing, too.
ReplyDeleteI'm not going to re-read this.
"I think its gravity is earned due to the strength of its mise-en-scene and its conversations."
ReplyDeleteI hope so! Sure does feel like that at times - the tavern scene in particular.
"That isn't denial, tho. Flip that: it's admission. The "fuck you" is to wallowing, too."
Absolutely the most positive way to look at it. What worries me is that its fuck-you to history is also a fuck-you to thought, though. Burn those motherfuckers and don't ask questions - revel in the spectacle, go home satiated. I feel like there are serious questions to be asked, and don't get the impression Tarantino (and his film) is even remotely interested in them...
This debate could rage on and on, of course - polarising territory...
Some other belated thoughts: I think Tarantino is interested in thought, and consequence, despite his bravado, precisely because he doesn't proffer tidiness. He's damned messy (though I do think the picture is tightly structured). He really does inherit a lot from De Palma (moreso than from Scorsese, I'd wager), though I dig QT more because he gets language more, and I don't think he's really out to shock in the same way; his violence makes a certain kind of sense. All the talk around this movie makes me question how much we want packed answers: the thrill of this movie, if you're vibing with it, is exactly its insanity. The fact that it can inspire so many divergent reactions says a lot, and not in just some banal "free play" sense of interpretation; rather, as a movie about projection (its romance ends in a booth! its lasting image is a beam of light catching smoke! its final image is the branding of the audience!) it demands you investigate your reaction, be it generous or dismissive. Maybe someday I can write something about it to account for all its wacky tangents and (possible) inconsistencies like that great _Taxi Driver_ piece by Farber and Patterson...
ReplyDeleteThis movie is perfect. Any argument against it can be met with any random thousand frames from the film itself. Take that, motherfuckers. QT engages morality, savagery, the surface of civilization, the movies, race, celebrity, patriotism-- so many ideas exercised with so little pretension, so much delirious film sense, such a greedy ear. He's writing what he knows and framing it all with an eye for what's astonishingly beautiful about human beings fighting for their lives/talking their way into/out of all kinds of shit. Ry, you're damn right, "personal."
ReplyDeleteYeah, I just saw it, so don't expect a reasoned defense.
Matthew Flanagan: "Amorality"? The Basterds have gone off the deep end, yes, but QT is eminently moral in his own filmmaking choices. That part of his profile comes through here better than any film he's made since Reservoir Dogs. He's just not especially eager to broadcast it (cuz he knows that's what far less secure filmmakers do as insurance). I walked out of this film noticing the color of people's eyes more acutely. It's that rare flick about scalp-hunting and mass murder that leaves you eager to meet somebody nice and have a long, close talk.
QT talks a lot about how he couldn't care less what's going on in the world when he's making his movies, but that's just tough talk. That zoom into Eli Roth's face as he fills Hitler full of lead is a kissing cousin of a similar tables-turned image near the end of Elem Klimov's Come and See. It's catharsis (not just for the specific historical moment, but for all occupied, oppressed people) lapsing into psychosis. An earlier Battle of Algiers music cue tips us that it ain't about the Nazis. It's about every bully there ever was.
Love this, Ry: "His images burn with light, which is synonymous with life and love for me, I suppose, so Shosanna's death (money) shot is pure affect splatter. It's the opposite of Marvin's brains, tho: this ain't no joke. It's operatic. It's hurt flying everywhere, it's romance spent. But, of course, her material ghost (zing!) gets the last laugh (zing!) in a vapor, rising, while our sanctioned memories get torched."
ReplyDeleteYes, QT has outgrown Marvin's brains, amen. That was 9th grade. He's in second semester of senior year now, with all kinds of discoveries and heartaches behind him.
Ry, you know I'm with you. I love the thought that this is a movie about projection, its own and ours. It casts all those negative reactions in a positive(ish) light. It at least provides a really good and interesting avenue to think of Tarantino outside of his self-reflexiveness and cinefilia, which I think is as important as it is difficult to do when looking at any of his films.
ReplyDeleteSteven, I'm with you too. Tarantino is smart, real smart, and I don't see why he's treated so often as some kind of cine idiot savant. His images are every bit his own, not the collaged-together references he's so often said to produce. They're branded as much as they burn.
But I don't know if it's right to say that 'QT has outgrown Marvin's brains'. I think those brains are his brains, and they'll always be. No doubt they've matured and developed but now they're Donny Donowitz hitting a Nazi Sgt. in the head with a bat, while the Basterds are us watching Pulp Fiction, laughing our asses off, and we're future/now us, distanced, watching Inglourious Basterds. I even think that they're there in Roth's killing of Hitler: so excessive as to verge on comic at the very moment its psychotic.
I like what Kiarostami said of QT, that since there'll always be violence in American cinema, at least QT makes fun of it.