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Film review: Inglourious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino's decade-in-the-making WWII Western stars Brad Pitt as American Lieutenant Aldo Raine, who heads a band of vigilantes set on killing Nazi soldiers

This curious beast of a film, with intertwining plots and mingling languages is an indulgent fiction set in a caricature of historic reality.

Tarantino's films are not known for their modesty and this flick has his name all over it. Over-indulgent gruesomeness abounds, from scalping to skull-stabbing and burning alive to brutal bashings from a baseball bat. But while Tarantino is known to amplify the violence, he succeeds in creating a picture of artistic merit rather than mindless gore. And after the first few pints of blood have been shed you rather get a taste for it.

Another credit to this film is the multi-national cast and European setting. Yes, this is Tinseltown's Tarantino, but the cultural context is closer to home. The film opens in deepest rural France, 1941, with green fields, a rugged dairy farmer and his beautiful peasant daughters. Their home is a wooden shack and their clothes are grubby. Their skin is hard from work and weather and beneath their floorboards they hide the jewish family Dreyfus from Nazi eyes.

One of these hideaways is our female protagonist Shosanna, who has a lucky escape from beneath the dusty floorboards to the neon lights of Paris. Later, she will take advantage of coincidence and seek revenge on the Nazis when a propaganda film premieres at the cinema she runs.

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