Two years after it was released, I finally got around to watching Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, which was shown on TV a few nights ago. A cursory scan of its initial reviews had failed to pique my interest but even my worst expectations hadn’t prepared me for how awful it turned out to be and now, in retrospect, I am baffled that it wasn’t universally panned.
Leaving aside
questions of taste and propriety, this utterly incoherent film doesn’t even
deliver on the things that Tarantino is supposed
to be good at: tone-deaf dialogue; interminable ‘suspense’; unfunny
‘humour’; clunking movie-buff references to UFA. The situation comedy ‘Allo, ‘Allo fired harder
and faster on all cylinders and provided greater insight into the moral
complexities of occupied France.
I was, I
admit it, an early Tarantino fan-boy.
Twenty years ago, back in the pre-internet paper-age, having read a
review of Reservoir Dogs, probably in
the NME, I rushed to see its one-night showing at a Scarborough cinema. There were 10 other people in the audience. One of them was my girlfriend, who I had made go, and another was a chap I knew,
who we bumped into on the street on the way, and I said to him “You *have* to
come and see this.” And I was
right. It was an event. It was, for us, like nothing else that we had
seen before, so smart, with its non-linear plot, so self-assured, so amorally,
humorously, violent, so NOW.
We cheered
along to True Romance in the damp and
decaying Opera House, which closed forever within weeks. There was no heat in there, we had to huddle
in our coats, and the staff didn’t give a damn that we had brought our own food
and bottles of wine and plastic cups.
Again, there were next to no other people in the audience. The Tarantino wave had not, as yet broke,
big.
Happening to
be in London over the weekend that it was released, I caught Pulp Fiction at Leicester Square and I
have rarely experienced such a buzz in a cinema audience as the title sequence
began. It was more of the same, packed with cultural references, wisecracking
and ultra-violent and, once more, non-linear and we lapped it up.
By the time I
saw Jackie Brown the critical faculties
were beginning to harden and I was somewhat inured to yet another bout of gangster
tosh. But the film, which remains his very
best, was redeemed by the warmth of the relationship that was portrayed between
Robert Forster and Pam Grier and it felt to me, without particularly noting
that this was an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel rather than an original
screenplay, as if Tarantino was maturing.
But I was
wrong. Immaturing would have been closer
to the mark.
The evidence
of the last fifteen years – the vampire schlock of Dusk Till Dawn; the martial-arts schlock of Kill Bill (Pts 1 and 2); the loathsome Inglourious Basterds; and the trailers for the recent (and, seemingly,
astonishingly misguided) Django Unchained
– suggest a director bereft of any real inspiration, surrounded by wide-eyed disciples assuring him that he is
the filmic genius of all time who can do no wrong, fixatedly dry-spunking his
way through an interminable, mechanically relentless, joyless masturbation.
He should get
out more.