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There’s this final shot in Quentin Tarantino’s latest World War II flick “Inglourious Basterds” where Brad Pitt almost looks straight into the camera with an admiring expression on his face and says “…I think this is my masterpiece”. This one comment literally summarizes the past two and a half hours screen time and the director’s own observation regarding the film and apparently a huge section of film fraternity all across the globe are quite inclined to agree with him in this regard. With this film, movie buffs will be acquainted with a more thoughtful, matured and wise avatar of this renowned video brat who has already made his place in the medium’s history with films like Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and the two volume epic Kill Bill among others.

Unlike his previous offerings, this film has a comparatively simpler plot and is even narrated in a linear fashion. However, the film gathers its strength from various other aspects making the idea of plot and narrative really insignificant compared to them. As Tarantino himself describes it, Inglourious Basterds is definitely a commentary on the Spaghetti Western which becomes quite evident in the opening sequence which is even titled “Once upon a time in Nazi occupied France” as a tribute to the legendary Sergio Leone. Besides using a Leone like choreographed cinematography, editing pattern accompanied by score composed by the inimitable Ennio Morricone, the viewers are introduced in this sequence to Standartenführer Hans Landa, a notorious Jew Hunter played with a delicious relish and panache by Cristoph Waltz and Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) who is a Jewish girl on the run with her family massacred by Landa. Thus the viewer’s are left with the two typical genre archetypes of the western; the lone avenger and the evil antagonist with considerable shades of grey tones.

Despite marked differences in style and approach from his earlier films, there are certain familiar Tarantino touches in the film which are equally enjoyable. Besides the quirky sense of humor injected in unlikely sequences, there is the shadow like presence of his comic strip sensibilities in sequence build up and characterizations along with sudden shifts to non fiction and documentary mode of address of both satirical and serious nature in case of the backdrop of Hugo Stiglitz and the commentary on the flammable nature of nitrate films both narrated by Samuel Jackson. An almost tactile and tangible symptom of Tarantino’s maturity becomes evident in his structuring of the film where he draws his tale not from history but from the concept of war presented in films and the notion of audience sympathizing with a party. In the penultimate sequence where ironically inside a cinema house and during a screening of a war propaganda film a large assortment of German people including a major section of Nazi political leadership are gunned down by the Basterds while the former are unarmed the notion of spectatorship of war films is questioned and thus disturbed in an unprecedented way and on a concluding note one must say that only Tarantino could pull off this thing while keeping up the usual cool and casual demeanor.