Yet Another Inglourious Basterds Poster Introduces Our Heroine

Cinematical have premiered the fourth poster in the Inglourious Batserds '...is a Basterd' series. This one features Melanie Laurent, who portrays the film's heroine Shosanna Dreyfus. Despite featuring only briefly in the trailers released so far, Basterds is pretty much Shosanna's story. She certainly gets the most important close up in the whole film.

The first scene of Quentin Tarantino's screenplay was published in the May issue of Vanity Fair and if you've read that, or the widely distributed pdf of the entire script, you'll know how Shosanna's story begins. She has very little to say and almost no room to move for pretty much the entire opening chapter but the sequence is very much all about her. Outwardly, Shosanna is a 'sit and wait' character in many respects, where Brad Pitt's Aldo Raine is always rushing onwards. It spoils nothing, I think, to reveal that he is heading straight towards her, even though he doesn't know it, and that the outcome is truly explosive.

As well as being a Cesar winning actress, Laurent has also directed a short film that the IMDB and Wikipedia describe as "pornographic". From the trailer on YouTube the deal seems to be that several female directors made short sex films for a TV anthology. Laurent's appears to be about a man visiting a stripper and the two of them being separated by a perspex screen but interacting a fair amount nonetheless.

Note that the score stands at two male Basterds to two female with these posters now, and I think we've pretty much now run out of leading ladies to feature. I daren't guess which of the other males might crop up but it seems that the Nazi characters are out of the running unless the slogan gets revamped. Just plain Bastards, maybe?