About Bridget leaving her shoe: she was severely injured, so the whereabouts of her shoes would not be a top priority for her at that moment.
About the film in general, I have just a few random thoughts:
- I really, really liked it, much more than I ever thought I would.
- OMG, Germans and Austrians were played by Germans and Austrians! The German language used was idiomatic and always translated accurately in the subtitles - what a nice surprise.
- It was great to be able to understand all three main languages used, and to watch the actors shift between them. I had no idea Daniel Brühl spoke such excellent French.
- I made a complete fool of myself when I shouted "Rainer Bock!" at the screen (He's one of my favourite actors at the best theatre here in Munich, I see him there all the time. He was in IB for a only a minute and had two or three lines at most. The people around me looked at me as if I was nuts).
- How familiar are people outside of Germany with Karl May and Winnetou??
- I'm not entirely sure if I understand Landa's motivation - so he's not really a Nazi (as he's eager to wipe out the Nazi leaders), but was their best Jew-killer simply he enjoyed the intellectual challange of the hunt?
And then there's this:
Something else that struck me about this, besides the obvious Jewish Revenge theme, was that it is very appealing on the level of these are Americans fighting for a cause that is not ambiguious in any way. It's been a while since you could root for Americans to succeed unilaterally in a mission not involving aliens or asteroids, so that was an additional carthartic element to it. Case in point, I watched the Hurt Locker right after.
It probably bears mention too, that the French in WWII have been heavily criticized by history - so I can see some French audiences getting some satisfaction in this revisionist conclusion as well.
I also think Germans probably find it cathartic. Imaging living the Nazi legacy.
I have been thinking about this post for a few hours now, and I haven't been able to come up with a response that I'm happy with yet. Maybe that's partly because I am afraid to voice any opinion for fear of becoming the voice of Germans in general. This is just good, old, little Emiliana, responding to the film in her very personal, not particularly politically-minded way. But here are a few ramblings anyway:
Sometimes I get sick and tired with Hitler and WWII being the only thing anyone ever seems to associate with Germany. On first hearing about Tarantino's plan to make a film about Nazi killers, that was my immediate reaction, because I feared it would be little more than sadistic slaughter-porn that didn't bother to make a distinction between Nazis and Germans, and between Germany then and Germany now.
That said, I can't stress strongly enough how important it is for this topic to be as big a part of popular culture and public discussion as it is. Ok, I had visited a concentration camp three times by the time I was twelve years old, and was thus thoroughly, utterly imprinted down to my very essence about just how horrible the Holocaust was. As a consequence, the omnipresence of the topic could feel slightly tiresome to me at times. However, I became aware very soon that not everone had my experiences, and that it was of the utmost importance that that chapter of history should never be forgotten, and that there were always new young people who needed to learn about it in the same clear terms as I had done.
In the end, I decided not to worry about which political agenda the film might have, but to see what it was like just as a film. And I thought it was a pretty damn great one, and the audience agreed (approximately two thirds German, one third American, English and other places) - cheers, applause... But I wouldn't want to say whether the cheers were due to a release of hereditary guilt - all I know is that I don't think that it was the case for me, but rather a result of the film's perspective and stakes, that automatically had you utterly loathe the nazi characters and deeply invested in Shosanna's story.
I was positively surprised that the film was quite clearly a revenge fantasy rather and not a depiction of actual history. Will the film help to cement Germans as brutal ex-Nazis in the minds of those non German movie-goers that maybe aren't very much interested in thinking outside the box and looking beyond their own nose? Maybe. Do I mind that? To a certain extent, yes. Do I think IB shouldn't have been made? Hell no, it's a fantastic film.
Don't know if any of this is coherent or insightful, but I'm not sure if I'll ever have anything better or more to say.