When Inglourious Basterds came out, some people complained that it was not what they had expected from a film advertised as depicting the work of freedom fighters behind enemy lines: No training scenes, no raids on barracks, wtf? It is possible that Tarantino's deviations from the genre standards were inspired by L'armée des ombres, Jean-Pierre Melville's 1969 flop about the French resistance. Thinking back to the plot, it seems a strange movie indeed: Never do we see the freedom fighters take any effective action against the Germans, and one comes away from the film with the feeling that had the resistance never existed, this would not have made much of a difference. Instead, what is chronicled are the internal workings of the group; much time is given to the killing of resistance members who gave away the names of comrades. 145 minutes long, it is deliberately paced (many people will find this movie boring), and its subdued mood is underlined by Pierre L'Homme's excellent, excellent cinematography, which might best be described as a technicolor version of the work Robert Elswit did for Michael Clayton, and which nicely contrasts with Eric de Marsan's very good, somewhat saccharine music. A minor masterpiece which teaches the lesson that even if you're fighting on the side of the good guys, you may end up doing ugly things. (8)
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