Inglorious Bastards / War

Studio: Visiona romantica 
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Year: 2009
Cast: Christoph Waltz, Lea Seydoux

The scene starts with title sequence displaying the text “one upon a time, in nazi-occupied france”. We start in the year 1941 with a shot of a man chopping wood next to a small house. A woman is then seen behind him hanging up washing on a washing line, as she is adjusting something to hang up she hears the rumbling of an engine and pears behind the cloth to see men approaching in vehicles which, when she sees the men she immediately turns around and alerts the man by saying “Papa” (which we can assume makes him her father). The man stops chopping wood as soon as he sees what she has seen, the mans other daughters come outside after hearing the sound of an engine and he tells them to go back inside quickly, he then tells the daughter who was hanging up the washing to fetch him some water for his clean

up and then go inside immediately. The man is seen sitting on a log wiping his face with a cloth as the men in vehicles get closer, his daughter then calls him to tell him the water is ready. The man splashes his face and neck with water to clean himself off as the men who we can now see are nazis park their vehicles outside is house. One of the Nazis then approaches the man and asks him “is this the property of perrier LaPadite” to which the man responds “i am Perrier LaPadite”, the other man then introduces himself as “Colonel Hans Landa of the SS” and asks to be invited into mr LaPadite’s home, to which he agrees. As they enter the home we see mr LaPadite’s three daughters lined up to greet the Colonel. Mr LaPadite introduces the Colonel to his family, to which the colonel kisses one of his daughters hands and exclaims “the rumors about your family are true, each one of your daughters are more lovely than the last”. Mr LaPadite invited the Colonel to sit down at the table and asks one of his daughter to get him some wine, to which the Colonel responds by asking her to get him milk instead as mr LaPadite owns a dairy farm. The Colonel then drinks the

milk and says “to both your family and your cows i say ‘Bravo’”. The Colonel then ask mr LaPadite to join him at the table and the tone of the scene
begins to shift. The Colonel then says that this conversation would be better discussed in private and asks mr Lapadite to ask his daughters to step outside. Once the daughters have left the Colonel then says that his french is beginning to exhaust and asks mr LaPadite to switch to english as he has heard that his english is good, to which mr LaPadite agrees. The conversation continues in english with the Colonel saying that he is very familiar with the LaPadite family, but asking if he is familiar with him, mr LaPadite says that he does know who he is and what his job is in france, to which the Colonel asks what he has heard. Mr LaPadie explains that he has heard that the Colonel's job is to run the lasting jews out of france, the colonel then says that that is correct, however, mr Lapadite exclaims his confusion towards this unexpected visit as he says “the germans have already looked through his house and found nothing”,but the Colonel explains that since they are under new managements they just need to close the file on his house once

more. The Colonel then begins to question mr LaPadite about the jewish families that lived in the area before the occupation, he asks mr LaPadite to confirm the family names of the jewish families. After this mr LaPadite asks the Colonel if he could smoke his pipe, to which the Colonel tells him to make himself comfortable. The Colonel then ask mr LaPadite about the Dreyfus family (one of the jewish families) as they were the only ones that have not been accounted for, to which mr Lapadite responds that he has only heard rumors, and that thode rumors were of the family escaping to spain. The Colonel then asks mr LaPadite to name all the members fo the Dreyfus family for documentation. Mr Lapadite then names all of the members of the family and makes an attempt to remember how old they were, as he is explaining this the camera pans down to reveal a family lying beneath the floorboards with

hands over their mouths, peering through the cracks, from this we can assume that these are the Dreyfus’ and mr LaPadite has been hiding the the whole time. Inglorious Bastards is War film as it is set in the 1940’s during the second world war, at the peak of hitlers social reign. The opening scene grasps the audiences attention by immediately introducing an opposing threat to the narrative and creating a fake atmosphere of hospitality within the
house as the Nazi officer acts very polite while doing a job that is a sharp juxtaposition to his attitude, once the audience is shown that they Dreyfus family is in fact in the house the tensio is heightened as it is a waiting game to see if the Colonel will find them or not. Based on the first scene i would estimate that the rest of the movie will follow the narrative of the second world war and the journey of the Dreyfus family.