You had to get up pretty early to score a spot at the very first screening of “Inglourious Basterds,” Quentin Tarantino’s new revenge fantasy set during World War II.
Thousands of journalists mobbed the Palais de Festival, and even Harvey Weinstein himself was seen running frantically from one entrance to another as guards told him non, monsieur, the room was ‘complet.’
I made it into the overflow screening room for more than two and a half hours of what was, for me, pure pleasure. Tarantino, who spent something like eight years wrestling with this script, has found himself in a newly mature space, without losing an ounce of the filmmaking joy that infuses his very best work.
It could be that I’ve been seduced by the cinephilic atmosphere, but it was hard to miss Tarantino’s skilled embrace of the elements that make theatrical moviegoing just plain great: scenes filled with dramatic tension, performances with depth and humor, rich and witty scoring choices, multi-lingual dialogue that Tarantino still stamps as his own, and knowing nods at cinematic history and the power of the medium he loves so well.
The trailer shortchanges the story as being about a group of Jewish soldiers sent behind the lines in Nazi-occupied France to extract brutal revenge. That is only part of it: Brad Pitt leads this group of “bastards” (Eli Roth, Til Schweiger) to scare the Nazis with their acts of vengeance.
But the story is equally that of a Jewish cinema-owner hiding in plain sight in Paris (Shosana, played by Martine Laurent), and her date with destiny in confronting the terrifying intelligence of SS officer Hans Landa, who murdered her family.
Pitt, back in stupid-southerner caricature as Aldo, is probably the least interesting person on the screen. Instead it is Landa, played by Christoph Waltz, an unknown to American audiences, who grabs the screen and walks off with the movie in one of the very best villainous portrayals in years. (My personal favorite screen Nazi is probably Ralph Fiennes in “Schindler’s List”; but Landa just earned a top spot too.)
At the press conference following the screening, where much of the multi-national cast joined Tarantino carrying glasses of champagne, the director said that he came close to pushing off production of the film because they couldn’t find the right actor to play Landa.
“At a certain point I didn’t think I’d find the right actor,” he said. “I realized that the character was pretty special. And I knew whoever I chose had to be as good in languages as Hans Landa, otherwise he couldn’t play the role.”
It came down to the wire in a week when the money to shoot the movie was meant to be closed. “I called (Lawrence Bender) on Monday and said if we didn’t find Landa, I don’t have a film. Lawrence said, ‘Cool.’”
That same week Waltz came in to audition. After two sentences, the director and producer caught one another’s eyes across the room, and Tarantino said: “We’re making the movie,” he recounted.
