Word: germanic
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...There was little surprise that the main Palme went to The White Ribbon, an austere and lacerating tale of collective brutality and guilt in a small German village two decades before Hitler took power. This is a pure art film, daunting and demanding, spare and unsparing, making no concession to the prevailing popular taste - except, perhaps, film-festival taste. It was also, as we two Cannes veterans attest, the finest work in the competition. Writer-director Michael Haneke, a personally austere gent who has won prizes here before, with The Piano Teacher (starring Huppert) and Caché, was finally forced...
...warscape, an octet of eight rambunctious Jews - most of them American but a couple German - have been set loose with the mission to kill and disfigure the enemy army. "A hundred Nazi scalps each" is the order of the Basterds' leader, Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt, chewing heartily on an Ozark accent), who either doesn't make the distinction between German soldiers and Nazis or doesn't care. While the Basterds are giving the Krauts bloody haircuts, Raine takes his pleasure carving swastikas on the foreheads of his favorite prisoners...
...parallel story lines that converge late in the film, German Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), a kind of supersleuth "Jew hunter" with a chatty, almost courtly demeanor, discovers and kills most of a Jewish family hiding in the cellar of a French farm. One girl, Shoshanna, escapes to Paris, where she runs a movie theater. She meets a young soldier, Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl of Good Bye Lenin!) who has become a battlefield hero and starred in his own military biopic, which is to receive its world premiere at Shoshanna's theater with top Nazis in attendance...
...Double and undercover agents fill out the movie's other main plots. A German-born English officer, Lieutenant Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender, of Hunger and Fish Tank), is sent by his OSS superior (Mike Myers in a low-key guest spot) to hook up in France with starlet Von Hammersmark, and thus get close enough to Hitler, Goering and Goebbels to kill them and end the war. (Two of the Reich's most beloved actresses, Zarah Leander and Olga Chekova, were later thought to be secret agents for the U.S.S.R.) Hicox and the actress rendezvous in a French...
...accent and laconic sadism; the other Basterds are mere war-film window dressing. This conflict is fought mainly between nasty Nazis and resourceful women. In her slinky dresses and fancy footwear (sometimes just one shoe), Kruger is steely glamour incarnate. And Waltz has the purring efficiency of a sleek German vehicle, not a tank but a Mercedes-Benz; he could take Cannes' Best Actor prize on Sunday night. The movie is pretty scrupulously played in the languages its characters would speak - except for one odd moment early on, when Landa tells the French farmer, "I ask your permission to speak...