L’incontro con la figlia can be heard in the closing moments of the first chapter, when the violence destroys the hiding place and Shosanna escapes. The piece does not belong to the development of the British plan.
The setting is the end of the farm
L’incontro con la figlia is a composition by Ennio Morricone from Il ritorno di Ringo, The Return of Ringo, from 1965. In Inglourious Basterds it accompanies the stretch that culminates in the violence against the Dreyfus family and Shosanna's escape. It is not a piece placed in the preparation of Operation Kino, which belongs to another chapter and another line of action.
The Italian title roughly means ‘the meeting with the daughter’. That title belongs to the original context of the music. It should not be used to invent a reunion between Shosanna and her father within Tarantino's film. The fragment changes function when it is incorporated into different images from those for which it was composed.
Identification also requires separating the film music from the commercial album selection. A piece may be heard in the film without forming part of the main record released under its title. That difference explains why looking only in an abridged album tracklist can leave out a perfectly recognisable fragment of the scene.
Its origins in an Italian western bring the end of the chapter close to a tradition of loss, pursuit and survival. That relationship does not need to become an equivalence between the plots. The music can carry a memory of genre while the concrete situation remains the pursuit of a Jewish family in occupied France.
From the extended dialogue to the move outside
The first sequence devotes a great deal of time to a conversation in a closed space. The arrival of violence breaks that organisation and makes Shosanna's movement take on a different intensity. The body in flight introduces a clear direction where questions and answers once dominated. The music accompanies that shift in perceptual regime.
The escape is not a complete victory. Shosanna manages to get away, but the possibility of staying alive is inseparable from what she has just lost. A purely triumphant accompaniment would reduce that contradiction. The emotional quality of the piece allows escape and devastation to remain together, without one cancelling the other out.
The distance between the house and the figure running also changes the scale of the danger. Inside, the characters were subjected to the closeness of Landa and his men. Outside, survival depends on gaining space. The music helps sustain the emotional continuity between both places, so that leaving the house does not seem to mean leaving its consequences behind as well.
The viewer is not given a full map of Shosanna's future. They see an immediate exit from a deadly situation. The fragment can lend that exit gravity without exactly announcing what the character will do afterwards. Its function belongs to the present of the escape and to the trace it leaves, not to a foretelling of her entire trajectory.
The music allows the end of a conversation to be experienced as something more than the start of a pursuit. During the interrogation, information circulated unevenly: some characters knew where the hidden people were, and others tried to keep that secret intact. After the gunshots, that structure of knowledge gives way to an immediate physical need. The piece sustains the transition from the effort to stay silent to the effort to escape. The change matters because the viewer has spent a long time listening to words before finally accompanying a body that runs.
A melody that preserves loss
Morricone's reuse offers an emotion that goes beyond the practical information of the escape. Knowing that Shosanna is getting away would be enough to follow the action; the music makes that moving away last in a felt way. The film allows us to follow the movement and, at the same time, to perceive that the space left behind can no longer be recovered as it was before.
There is no need to attribute to the composition an exact translation of each thought of the character. The music does not give literal access to her mind. It works with the audience's attention and with the relationship between the images. It can express grief or helplessness to the listener without those terms being spoken within the scene.
Within the Inglourious Basterds soundtrack, this piece serves a different purpose from The Verdict, which accompanies the arrival at the farm. One prepares the approach of the threat; the other is linked to its consequences. The difference allows the first chapter to have a musical arc rather than a single undifferentiated tone of suspense.
The relationship between Morricone and Tarantino's cinema includes many appropriations of this kind, but here the effect is concentrated on a girl who becomes a survivor before the viewer's eyes. The music does not restore her family or turn the escape into a happy ending. It keeps open the distance between having escaped death and having been able to preserve the life that existed before the visit.
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