Friday, September 4, 2009

Fictional Female Fridays: Shosanna from "Inglourious Basterds"

Inglourious Basterds Nashville Premiere

Jewish producer Lawrence Bender described Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds" as a "fucking Jewish wet dream."

That phrase seemed kind of offensive, but the guy's Jewish and it's also kind of true. A less offensive term would be "a great fantasy film," as my mom described it, and a "wouldn't-it-be-cool-if-that-actually-happened?" movie as my dad said.

Personally, I liked the part where Eli Roth shot Hitler in the head repeatedly until his face sort of exploded.

Anyway, back to Shosanna Dreyfus, a beautiful Jewish woman in her early 20's played by stunning French actress Mélanie Laurent. After witnessing the brutal massacre of her family hiding beneath the floorboards in a dairy farmer's home, she escapes to Paris, gathers forged papers and runs a movie theater.

A Nazi admirer convinces his superiors to hold the premiere of his film, where he portrays himself as a war hero, at her theater. 

Shosanna decides to burn it down with the help of her African-American boyfriend.

Though never aware of each other's plans, the Basterds, once they discover Hitler and his comrades will be in attendance, form their own plot to blow up the theater.

The Basterds take a quick and easy route by strapping dynamite to their legs, but Shosanna's plot to lock the Nazis in the theater, reveal herself as a Jew on the big screen, and slowly let it burn is much more creative and much more dramatic.

The Basterds raise suspicion the moment they walk into the theater, but Shosanna keeps her cover until her on-camera moment.

Her beautifully scripted mass murder scheme was the perfect contrast to Roth's intently focused face as he shot Hitler's face into the floor.   

1 comment:

  1. shoshanna's boyfriend is not african-american, he is black. this is not to imply that the two are mutually exclusive, but the incorrect labeling of marcel as aa, if its use is an arbitrary replacement for "black" based only on its assumed pc-friendliness, is far more offensive than the deeming of a non-(North) American of African ancestry as "black" in the first place.

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