Quentin Tarantino is to return to the film festival that made his name with a movie that is certain to be the most controversial of his career.
Next month, the brilliant and outrageous director will arrive in Cannes, where his 1994 film Pulp Fiction was such a hit, to relaunch a career that, by his high standards, has been in the doldrums.
The work he is taking to the world's premier film festival is an ultra-violent take on the second world war and that most sacred of Hollywood movie subjects, the Holocaust.
The news that Tarantino was bringing his film, with the deliberately misspelt title Inglourious Basterds, set the movie world alight with speculation that Tarantino and his star, Brad Pitt, will dominate Cannes this year.
It is certainly a place where Tarantino has always felt at home. Pulp Fiction won the festival's highest honour, the Palme d'Or, 15 years ago, catapulting the already controversial director of cult hit Reservoir Dogs to worldwide fame and acclaim. Since then he has served as president of the festival's jury and also shown several other films there. Now Cannes could return him to the forefront of the Hollywood elite and win back American audiences, which have been lukewarm to him recently.
"He is still taken seriously in France. He has a very good relationship with French audiences. Europeans generally see him in the tradition of the auteur and the outsider in Hollywood," said Professor Brad Prager, a film expert at the University of Missouri.
Inglourious Basterds follows a spate of recent movies dealing with the war and Nazi treatment of Jews, including Defiance, The Reader, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Valkyrie and Good. But it is safe to say that it has little in common with them except the period in which they are set. It appears to be in Tarantino's tradition of a darkly comic gorefest that has more to say about the conventions of film-making than about its ostensible subject.
Pitt is its biggest name, playing the leader of a group of Jewish American soldiers recruited to hunt down and kill Nazis in the most dramatic and brutal ways possible, inspiring panic in the Third Reich. In a trailer, Pitt's character gives his squad a pre-mission pep talk: "We're going to be doing one thing and one thing only: killing Nazis!" If the rest of the trailer - blood spattering on walls and violent shoot-outs - is anything to go by, Pitt's men deliver.
So far Jewish groups have kept their silence on the film. The Anti-Defamation League in America - not usually shy of such debates - declined to comment on the film when asked by the Observer. But the Holocaust getting the Tarantino treatment is bound to cause controversy, with comment likely on his trademark comic-book violence or his use of comedy actors such as Mike Myers and BJ Novak, star of the US version of The Office.
"Tarantino always finds a corner of any film where he can push it too far. His signature is to go beyond the bounds of good taste," said Prager.
That may be true. But it might be a mistake to get too worked up about Tarantino venturing into such a sensitive area. Experts say his films are never comments on their historical subjects, but homages to other films about those subjects. Inglourious Basterds is partly inspired by the - correctly spelt - Inglorious Bastards, a 1978 film by Enzo Castellari. But its main influences appear to be war movies such as The Dirty Dozen or even spaghetti westerns. "It is a film about other films. His work is very stylised and is padded with allusions that show he has seen tons of movies," said Christopher Sharrett, a film studies professor at Seton Hall University.
That is unlikely to change with Inglourious Basterds. Though the film is a long-standing labour of love for Tarantino, he seems unlikely to break new ground with it.
A leaked early copy of the script was notable chiefly for scenes of carnage in which characters were scalped or shot in the testicles. There was little intellectual study of the Holocaust or Nazism. "There is a strong element of cynicism and even nihilism with Tarantino. I doubt that it is going to be bringing any new insight into the second world war or the Holocaust," said Sharrett.
Growth of a cult
Tarantino born Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1963. At 22, took a video shop job to indulge his movie obsession.
Released his first film, the gory Reservoir Dogs, in 1992. Instant cult hit.
Won Cannes Palme d'Or with the equally bloody Pulp Fiction in 1994.