A non-Jewish filmmaker just made the most explicitly pro-Jewish movie ever made: a gory, blood-splattered, sprawling revisionist epic in which a group of Jewish men dole out vengeance to scum-bag Nazis. We already knew that going in, but Quentin Tarantino's masterpiece is even better--and even more of a slap in the face to antisemites--than we could ever have imagined.
Before he gets his (and our) cinematic revenge, Tarantino begins Inglourious Basterds by showing us the wrong he is righting. With one single representative scene, the writer/director pays his respects to the Shoah with a suspenseful, unbearably sad opening seqenence in which a Jewish-French family hiding beneath the kitchen floor of a dairy farmer is massacred, save one daughter--Shoshanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent.) The scene is mesmerizing in its menace, thanks to a horrifying performance by Christoph Waltz as Col. Hans Land, a mannered, politely evil villian who is proud of the moniker, "the Jew-hunter."
Shoshanna escapes and changes her name; she passes as a gentile while running a movie theater in Paris. A German "war hero" becomes smitten by her and forces himself into her life despite her obvious initial disinterest and later repulsion. She is in love with a black Frenchman named Marcel, and when the Nazis decide to change the venue of her German suitor's premier of his new propaganda film Nation's Pride from the Ritz to her theater, she and Marcel plan a grand revenge.
Most Jews--especially testosterone-fueled Jewish males--will relate most to the story of the Basterds, especially the Jewish German badass Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger,) a human time bomb of pent-up aggression who joins the group late in the game. (Hugo is named after a Mexican horror actor.) Others will be most touched by Shoshanna's story, whose revenge is especially cathartic because she asks the Nazis "to look into the face of the Jew" who is going to kill them as the theater hosting the Third Reich goes up in flames.
What makes Basterds so glorious, though, is how it sets the record straight involving Jewish cinema. A staple of antisemitism is linking Jews with cinema. Well-meaning idiots like the ADL's Abe Foxman deal with this particular prejudice by denying the truth of its source. Tarantino is saying fuck that--cinema is Jewish peoples' jazz. While many, many non-Jews (like Tarantino) have made great films, there is no question that Jews were pioneers in cinema and a disproportionate number of us have helped advance it into a sublime art form.
Tarantino writes a spine-tingling scene where two men discuss German cinema. They agree that Jewish German directors (like Fritz Lang) were instrumental in making German cinema ahead of its time. They correctly point out that Joseph Geobbels' crude but popular propaganda films (as well as Leni Riefenstahl's well-made but no less repulsive propaganda films) were a response to "the Jewish German intellectual cinema of the 1920's."
Basterds gives us our props. The Jewish girl works at a cinema. She argues with a German soldier about Riefenstahl. She puts up the Jewish name "Pabst" over the title of a legitimate film but refuses to put a German propagandist's name over his filth. She sticks up for a Jewish director and earns the scorn of a Nazi by doing so ("Don't ever say that name to me!!" he shrieks.) By making Jewish-made cinema so integral to the film's plot and themes, Tarantino adds a symbolic revenge to the overt, visceral revenge that mainstream audiences are applauding.
Basterds is--to my mind--nearly perfect, creatively. Morally, I have only one caveat. At times Tarantino paints all Germans with the same stereotypical brush. A person ignorant of German culture would be forgiven for coming out of this film thinking all Germans eat nothing but sauerkraut sandwiches and strudels ("“Take your weinerschnitzel-lickin’ finger and point out on this map what we want to know" Brad Pitt says to a German officer,) and that the only Germans who supported Jews during WWII were Jewish Germans like Stiglitz.
Tarantino should be proud. He has created another exciting, passionate, immensely popular work of art. Americans love it; Germans love it.* And any Jew who knows a good friend when he sees one should love both the film and the man who made it.
*"Tarantino's Massacre of Nazis Brings Rave Reviews in Germany," Assaf Uni.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1109602.html
2 comments:
Inglorious was tremendous and your review was very good. I especially enjoyed the section that discussed Jewish cinema in Germany and in general. It is definitely true that many anti-Semites see Jews as “controlling” cinema, Hollywood conspicuously, and as preposterous as such a notion is, as you observe of Tarantino’s message about Jewish cinema, Jews were certainly integral to propelling cinema to the undeniable status of high art. There is certainly a difference between a demographic being centrally integral in the furthering of cinematic creativity and art and controlling, as through some monolithic cabal, said art.
Thanks for the extremely thoughtful comment and generous support, JDHURF.
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