Director: Quentin Tarantino

Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino

Running time: 2 hr 31 mins

Genre: Drama/Crime/Thriller

CRITIQUE:

There’s a popular belief that if one doesn’t enjoy a Tarantino film, one doesn’t really appreciate cinema. If you happened to sit through Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and found yourself profoundly bored, then that is perfectly understandable. Possibly only a fraction of the cinema audience comprehend that Dogs is a heist film without a heist, and that Fiction is Tarantino essentially juggling film narrative around its head. Meaning you’d have to be like Tarantino himself, to some extent, with a fair knowledge of cinema back catalogues to be able to understand how the hell Tarantino made himself the King of Indiewood. For all his supreme geekiness and self-indulgence, this is the man who rebelled against American film conventions, sought the French cinema and Italian spaghetti Westerns for refuge, and turned as the enfant terrible of Hollywood. So if you have seen Inglourious Basterds and felt vastly affronted by its irreverence, then you don’t know Tarantino at all. For the last man on Earth you’d expect to be virtuous to history books, it’s Tarantino.

His latest reworking of World War II, Inglourious Basterds sticks out like a sore thumb from the genre it belongs to, populated by a throng of unsmiling war pictures. Not so much borrowed as ripped off from a 1978 film of the same title (no, this is not a remake), Tarantino demonstrates here his ostensible love for movies by paying homage to specific genres, and then simultaneously, insolently sticks two fingers back at them – like a kid who just found a better toy and then shows it off to the other playmates. He adopts a Western approach to this war film, with nods to The Dirty Dozen and The Searchers, giving a sense of aptness to its storyline, a gang of ‘basterds’ who unremorsefully execute Nazis in occupied France.

And what a deliciously, delightfully irreverent this film is. It has a genuinely gripping opening with barely an action sequence, where the Machiavellian Nazi Col. Hans Landa (an exceptional, darkly droll performance by Christoph Waltz, who deserves to win that Oscar Best Supporting Actor statuette) visits a countryside hut to inspect stowaway Jews. It has a chameleonic screenplay that transforms into a revenge saga and assassination plot, studded with trademark Tarantino playfulness and smarts, which are very much needed in this episode of history that usually demands too much moping and weeping. That La Louisiane bar scene reminds us of Tarantino’s writing prowess, using dialogues as tense as a ticking bomb.

Tarantino also draws his characters with his labour of love, not necessarily in realist terms, but in pure cinematic larger-than-life broadness. Like Kill Bill, we have an avenging angel in Basterds named Shosannah (a remarkable Melanie Laurent), a runaway Jew who becomes a cinématheque proprietor whose cinema is the centre-point for Hitler’s assassination, and Tarantino invests in his characters so much that when we witness Shosannah pulling off her vengeance, we’re rooting for her. Brad Pitt’s scenery-chewing Lt. Aldo Rayne, a Kentucky drawl-spitting Southerner, may be a caricature but Pitt gamely plays the role with onscreen gruffness. But it’s Waltz who reigns this show with his unreservedly dark and cunning creation of a Nazi, unlike any other representations. His Col. Landa is a juxtaposition of charismatic smiles and sarcasm, one that cannot be categorised simply as ‘pure evil’, but evil with complexity – a self-saving hypocrite that knows no loyalty but to oneself.

VERDICT:

RATING: A

Director: Jacques Audiard

Screenplay: Jacques Audiard

Running time: 2 hr 31 mins

Genre: Drama/Crime/Thriller

CRITIQUE:

There is one common denominator in the contemporary European cinema, and that is the gritty, socio-realist aesthetic. Take away the hard-edged brutality of Gomorrah and the stripped-down, handheld look of Entre Les Murs, and you take away these films’ ethos – which is to portray social reality with its complex moralities in the rawest of cinematic art. The trend continues with Jacques Audiard’s recent addition to the European movement, the abrasive yet uncompromisingly engrossing A Prophet, which won the Gran Prix for this year’s Cannes Film Festival. On one hand, it’s a prison drama with a central protagonist learning prison life the hardest of ways, and on another, a crime film that explores the politics of the mafia ruling class within the prison walls and the organised crimes that perturb the outside world. At the mention of prison drama and mafia movie, classics like The Shawshank Redemption and The Godfather come to mind, but Audiard very quickly disposes the clichés – 19-year old Arab Malik enters jail for unexplained reasons and the prison’s corrupt feudal system is laid barely straight away. It is ruled by Luciani, an old don with an erratic temper, the boss of Corsican thugs that holds an iron grip amongst the entire inmate populace, and even surreptitiously conniving with crooked guards. Malik is suddenly cornered and is faced with a terrible choice: play their game and survive, or defy and die.

A Prophet is at its best when it depicts the prison environs like a chess game. There are two black-and-white pieces that stand on both sides on the ground: the Corsicans and the Arabs, both foreigners on the French terrain. Malik is a pawn being pushed around to commit horrific deeds, such as killing a helpless enemy. But he soon learns the shady movements of his king, plays his game as he works his way to the top of the hierarchy – educating himself on the process. He enters prison naive, illiterate and wide-eyed, and later comes out world-wise, and perhaps sensible. All this without an iota of cheapo sentimentality induced.

But its main flaws lie in its utterly labyrinthine narrative, where the film has to rely on cinematic name tags to introduce characters, who have either all-too-abrupt appearances or has little to do with the vast network of players. Where it is strong in its authentic prison realities, its ambitious crime-film scale has a whiff between the blend of Scorcese and Meirelles, losing the translation of Malik’s real moral journey into self-redemption. These flaws are then easily overshadowed by Audiard’s relentless, often cynical, direction, letting the film rescue itself on the final act – where the power struggle is finally put to rest, the kingpin checkmated and Malik emerging out of prison an entirely different man.

VERDICT:

RATING: A-