10 Best Performances In War Movies

Mélanie Laurent was a well established actress in France and Belgium by 2009, but it was her appearance in Quentin Tarantino’s wildly anachronistic World War 2 epic that exposed her to many mainstream movie goers. As Shoshanna Dreyfus she is the heart of the picture and arguably the hero of the piece, a young Jewish woman in Paris who takes a major stand against Nazi occupancy.

Laurent shares many of her scenes with Daniel Bruhl as a Nazi war hero, and must juggle her steely determination and lust for revenge with the identifiable threat of being a young woman receiving the unwelcome attention of a powerful man. With much of the film not far off a live action cartoon (in a good way, mostly), she keeps Inglourious Basterds grounded. She’s the character most easy to relate to, and hers is a strong, powerful performance.

This being a Tarantino film, things don’t end without a little blood spilling, but Laurent’s final image - a message of defiance blown up on a cinema screen - is iconic. Tarantino’s depiction of women is often questionable (even in this very film), but with Shoshanna, and with Laurent, he got it right.