Tarantino and Language

I’m not a great fan of Quentin Tarantino, nor am I a film critic. I was frightened by Inglourious Basterds but enjoyed the acting performances of the German actress Diane Kruger and the Austrian Christopher Waltz, among others, including also Brad Pitt, the American.
Both of these (first-named) accomplished performers are multilingual by their European heritage; Kruger, who has not too long ago entered upon her acting career, has developed almost faultless English (she needs it for her work) and also speaks excellent French and some Russian, which she apparently studied for a film. The diabolic Waltz, an Austrian, naturally speaks German, and has good French and excellent English. Austrian German is markedly different from Hochdeutsch or cultivated standard German, and there wasn’t a trace of it that I could hear from Waltz — this may have irritated the Austrian critics of the movie, which, I must say, makes otherwise an impression of remarkable linguistic verisimilitude. It begins with a scene in the French countryside, with Waltz speaking French, and then English, to a French farmer who is harboring some Jews under his floorboards. The shift from French to English, marking the shift from an initial exchange of pleasantries (and Waltz enjoying a glass of farm-fresh French milk) to the Nazi colonel’s pressuring the poor farmer to admit he is hiding people, dramatizes the role language plays in human interaction. Waltz, or his character, Col. Landa, is a master of multilingual power. It is spine-tingling, almost unbearable for my poor nerves to endure.

Tarantino goes over the top, as they say nowadays, when he presents a grotesque confrontation between Brad Pitt, leader of an American band of “Nazi-hunters” in France, and Col Landa. Landa knows that Pitt is an American posing as an Italian film-maker in a starched-shirt-front tuxedo, and he decides to make fun of him. When Diane Kruger (a double-agent) introduces Pitt to Landa as Italian, Waltz erupts into a torrent of fluent Italian, to Kruger’s frustration and embarrassment — “Germans aren’t very good at Italian,” she had assured Pitt, hence they picked Italian as their language front.

I suspect Waltz doesn’t really speak fluent Italian, but he memorized this speech beautifully. The hilarious attempts by Pitt and his group to “speak Italian” are Tarantino’s parody of the ignorant American in Europe, an old joke, an old jibe going back as far as Henry James, but one that still stands. Why aren’t we fluent, like the Germans, the Dutch, the French, the Swiss?
Well — you can speak some Russian. That’s one small step for America, I suppose. Keep it up!