Great Character: Shosanna Dreyfus (“Inglourious Basterds”)

The Great Character theme for the month: Tarantino characters. Today: Jason Cuthbert looks at Shosanna Drefus from the movie Inglourious Basterds.

Imagine witnessing your family being barbarically bombarded by bullets for merely being born into their ethnicity? Welcome to the broken world of Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), the traumatized Jewish cinema lover in Quentin Tarantino’s epic 2009 Nazi revenge romp Inglourious Basterds. With Academy Awards and over $321 million, audiences clearly didn’t mind watching history get rewritten, with Shosanna going toe-to-toe against Adolf Hitler himself.

Inglourious Basterds IMDB:

In Nazi-occupied France during World War II, a plan to assassinate Nazi leaders by a group of Jewish U.S. soldiers coincides with a theatre owner’s vengeful plans for the same.

As Brad Pitt’s character Lieutenant Aldo “The Apache” Raine leads his warriors to claim Nazi scalps and claim the name of the movie itself, the Inglourious Basterds make their crucial contribution to the plot in a predominately physical manner. Shosanna Dreyfus’ escape from Nazi slaughter and exodus into Paris as Emmanuelle Mimieux, cinema theater owner, is the heart-stirring emotional layer that humanizes the suffocating sight of bloody hatred. Shosanna is the living, breathing face to the horrific genocide that Hitler’s men are being killed over. Seeing her struggle to avoid suspicion is a reminder that she may be alive, but everything she has ever known has already died underneath those gun-powered floorboards she fled from.

The German occupation of France further complicates Shosanna’s assimilation into her new identity. Especially when a Nazi war hero Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl) uses his cinema trivia and upcoming autobiographical film premiere to push Shosanna towards reciprocal romance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PolzQMFju_s

To add an additional layer to Shosanna’s plight against racist extermination is her intercultural relationship with Marcel (Jacky Ido), a Frenchman of African decent who works with Shosanna as a theater projectionist. Although Shosanna can masquerade her Jewishness from the Nazi hate crusade, Marcel on the other hand obviously can’t hide his ethnicity. Yet still, despite the violent risk involved, Shosanna’s unconditional commitment to Marcel further makes her the shiniest symbol of compassion in this inglourious warzone.

As Zoller’s attraction to Shosanna pushes Hitler and his Third Reich higher-ups closer into her crosshairs, Shosanna and Marcel ride-or-die towards one high in Fahrenheit movie premier.

SHOSANNA DREYFUS: I am going to burn down the cinema on Nazi night.

After seeing the 20 minute intensity of interrogation from the homicidal Hans “The Jew Hunter” Landa (Christoph Waltz) that opened Inglourious Basterds, his second enthralling grilling of Shosanna, over strudels and cream, carries the added stop-breathing suspense stemming from us having already seen his template for evil implemented on Shosanna’s deceased family.

Does he know that she is that same girl that dodged his death trap several years back? Will Shosanna collapse to fear/vengeance and attempt a random assassination right at that restaurant table?

Pressure builds up into a blistering blueprint that Alfred Hitchcock might have loved. As Shosanna navigates through the world of a victim and graduates into durable resistance, we witness the emergence into her own version of an “inglourious basterd,” one derived from the evil that evil gave birth to.

SHOSANNA DREYFUS: (threatening a French film developer) You either do what the fuck we tell you, or I’ll bury this axe in your collaborating skull.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQncV8eYOBI

For her struggle with 24-hour Nazi nightmares that pushed her to consider hosting her next red carpet screening in the after life –Shosanna Dreyfus is one of the most sympathetic of Quentin Tarantino’s GREAT CHARACTERS.

Couldn’t agree more with Jason: Shosanna is one of the most sympathetic character Tarantino has written and provides an emotional center point in Basterds.

Thank you, Jason, for this post. Please join us in comments to discuss Inglourious Basterds.

You may follow Jason on Twitter: @A2Jason.