Quentin Tarantino’s most ambitious film, whose ending has been discussed like no other in his career, has recently become available to stream on Netflix.
Quentin Tarantino has already stepped on the toes of various critics in his career. However, his war film Inglourious Basterds, released in 2009, was watched with suspicious eyes. After the B-movie revenge fantasies Kill Bill and Death Proof, Tarantino also tackled the cinematic representation of not only the Second World War, but also the Holocaust. In particular, the finale of the film, which streams in Netflix’s catalog.
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Now on Netflix: Why Inglourious Basterds heralds a new Tarantino era
Inglourious Basterds is one of Quentin Tarantino’s best films and marks the beginning of a new era in the Pulp Fiction director’s oeuvre. Prior to this, Tarantino first and foremost worked his way through film history, from the gangster film Reservoir Dogs to the grindhouse entry Death Proof. Film and, above all, genres continue to play a major role, of course, but with Inglourious Basterds the focus shifted to the staging of reality: namely history.
Watch the trailer for Inglourious Basterds:
Basterds deals with the war and the genocide of the European Jews in a fictional plot inspired by war films such as The Dirty Dozen and Kill Them All and Return Alone. Django Unchained and The Hateful 8 followed this pattern, tackling slavery and the aftermath of the Civil War. And in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, Tarantino turned his attention to the murder of Sharon Tate and her friends by members of the Manson family.
Especially in view of his latest film, Inglourious Basterds seems like the blueprint for Tarantino’s work over the past decade. And that is especially true at the end. Because Tarantino doesn’t just rework real history in fictional scenarios. To a certain extent, he rewrites history in Basterds and also in Once Upon a Time
How was the ending of Inglourious Basterds received in 2009?
The story of the Jewish woman Shoshanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) and the dirty dozen under Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), who simultaneously attempt to eliminate the Nazi leadership, famously takes a few liberties with real historical events
The Basterds ending: “Tasteless” and “shockingly insensitive”?
The sensation was correspondingly great after Inglourious Basterds premiered in 2009 in what was incidentally a spectacular Cannes year (Antichrist! Enter the Void! The White Ribbon!). Basterds became the subject of discussion in feature articles, blogs and books like hardly any other Tarantino film before or since.
As Ty Burr summed it up in the Boston Globe, “You take a Tarantino movie seriously at your peril, which is why Inglourious Basterds is his biggest risk yet: an entertaining action-comedy about – watch out – the Holocaust.” And:
It’s obviously too much to ask of a smart kid – which Tarantino still is at 46 – to expect him to deal with history in any meaningful way.
David Denby in the New Yorker called the movie “ridiculous and appallingly insensitive”. Wendy Ide for the British Times (via Rotten Romatoes ) saw a “crude, infantile and deeply tasteless” movie.
J. Hoberman of the Village Voice saw a film that “enables Jews to behave like Nazis by participating in cold-blooded massacres and mass burnings, forcing an almost psychotic break with reality through wish fulfillment. “
