Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Inglourious Basterds’ to premiere at Cannes

Monday, April 6: Director Quentin Tarantino marks his return to the big screen with a typically ultra-violent new film due to premiere at next month's Cannes Film Festival. How is the 46-year-old pushing the envelope this time? By taking the Holocaust as his subject matter. His new offering, the deliberately misspelt Inglourious Basterds, follows a group of Jewish-American soldiers, led by Brad Pitt, as they hunt down Nazis with a view to killing them in the most violent ways possible.

Tarantino will be hoping that Cannes greets his new film with the same enthusiasm it showed for his 1994 festival offering, Pulp Fiction. That film won the Palme d'Or and gave the filmmaker a springboard to worldwide fame. Since then, Tarantino has created a series of super-violent films, including the Kill Bill films and Deathproof, none of which have achieved the same commercial, critical or cult success of Pulp Fiction and the earlier Reservoir Dogs.

Inglourious Basterds is destined to attract controversy, Tarantino has insisted that the production is not intended as a comment on the Holocaust but rather as a ‘spaghetti Western’ set in Nazi-occupied Europe. Before shooting the film he told the Hollywood Reporter: "I'm going to find a place that actually resembles, in one way or another, the Spanish locales they had in spaghetti Westerns – a no man's land. With American soldiers and French peasants and the French resistance and Nazi occupiers, it was kind of a no man's land. That will really be my spaghetti Western but with World War II iconography."

The trailer for the 2009 film (see below) leaves few questions about the style of Inglourious Basterds. "We will be cruel to the German and through our cruelty they will know who we are. They will find the evidence of our cruelty in the disembowelled, dismembered and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us," growls Pitt while statements smeared on the screen in blood let the readers know that "you haven't seen war until you've seen it through the eyes of Quentin Tarantino".
The Cannes Film Festival runs from May 13 – 24.

FIRST POSTED APRIL 6, 2009