They've Gotta Have It: DA 5 BLOODS

Landmines planted years ago are still harvesting death all these years later. So explains a woman (Mélanie Thierry), a descendant of a Frenchman who got rich as a colonizer in Vietnam, when she meets a group of Black American veterans who’ve returned to the country. She’s telling them what she’s doing out in the jungles, though they aren’t about to tell her they’re after gold they buried on one of their tours of duty over forty years prior. They’re all excavating past sins, she looking to clear her ancestor’s exploitation from her conscience, while the vets are hoping to take back some riches owed for theirs. The gold was American payment to collaborating villagers who were later napalmed casualties of the war. These soldiers found it and hid it for later—for our people, their afroed leader (Chadwick Boseman) assured them. Reparations. The woman’s statement, though, is also a signpost signaling an important theme running through Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, a film about all sorts of landmines, long buried, blasting like new for characters who’ve gone to war but never really came back. Lee, at the full command of his powers as a master filmmaker, has made a film freely mixing present and past, genre and drama, violence and serenity, revenge and recompense. It’s as ambitious a film as he’s ever made. It knows all the right pressure plates to press to build suspense and ignite surprise, sharply, and with studied complexity. A pair of Vietcong vets buy Da Bloods drinks in an opening scene—signaling a film in which history has ways of hiding and revealing the unexpected, even in plain sight.

Here’s a film with full, textured characters who expand and deepen as the film goes on, capable of surprising us with new layers. It’s enough to remind you how simple most films are, how surface level they remain as characters are too thin to change, or grow along predictable lines. No, Lee’s screenplay (co-written with his BlacKkKlansman collaborator Kevin Willmott from a draft by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo) knows too much about world history, and about film history, to stay on the surface. We begin with a reunion of the four surviving Bloods, whose bonds were forged in the heat of Saigon and the jungles beyond. It’s Ho Chi Minh City now, and the men have changed, too. There’s Otis (Clarke Peters) who walks with a limp, pops pain pills, and hopes to reconnect with a Vietnamese woman he left behind (Lê Y Lan). Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) is softer, and Eddie (Norm Lewis) is richer—he offers to pay for them all, at least— than when last they saw this place. And Paul (Delroy Lindo), still wracked with PTSD which flares up around the sights and sounds of this place, smugly dons his MAGA hat, to the shock of his compatriots and his estranged son (Jonathan Majors). And yet none of them stay in the first impression we have of them—they are capable of more, rising to difficult occasions or succumbing to dreadful outcomes as the plot rises up to meet them. They all have grown weary and troubled with age, driven at this late stage to find the gold that they think will begin to restore what was taken from them by a pointless war that started their adult lives on a note of such violence and emotional toll. The film is bookended with archival footage of Black dissent—opening with Muhammed Ali explaining why he would not serve in Vietnam, and closing with Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking before a crowd about liberty. Lee gives the movie this mournful edge of righteous agitation, setting a key flashback scene during the war against a radio report of MLK’s assassination, Black soldiers left to wonder if their lives matter.

In true Spike Lee fashion, the film is no mere political sloganeering, nor does it reach for easy answers. Indeed, it proceeds first as a gripping entertainment and draws confidently its ambiguities before dropping rhetorical flourishes. The film is rich in allusion — a Heart of Darkness boat up the river to their buried Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a journey begun from an Apocalypse Now-themed bar. Old war buddies hang out, banter, reminisce, drink, and dance, and then the search drags on and the metaphorical storm clouds gather on the horizon. (The ensemble is terrifically convincing every step of the way, with Lindo’s escalating, sweaty, paranoia a clear standout as it builds to a startling paranoid monologue of Greek tragedy proportions, cut with a lens flare of astonishing grace.) Lee also confidently mixes film stock and aspect ratios — grainy square combat flashbacks and gruesome real war photography, digital scope present-tense, and taller frames swelling with terse suspense. It’s loose in its telling at first, freely cutting between tones and tensions, allowing us to know the characters and feel out their relationships to each other and to their lives. And then it tightens its grip as the action narrows in focus and the stakes get higher.

After all, this treasure hunt is a journey to confront the darkest moment of their past. It kicks up all sorts of memories, jealousies, regrets, and fears. And the film does, too. Memories of Vietnam war films, men-on-a-mission movies, elegiacally sweeping American epics and melancholic revisionist Westerns. They’re stirringly recombined in Lee’s trademark style, probing and provocative—here made contemplative and cynical, blisteringly violent at times and unmistakably, understandably aggrieved. Here’s a movie that knows all too well our American propensity for spotting potential landmines in our culture, then burying them, hoping against hope they won’t explode on us in the future. These vets, returning to extract a dream long deferred, fall into or respond against American traditions of greed, violence, exploitation, racism, and nativism. Their fallen comrade, whose remains now surely mark the spot, represents both trauma and treasure. And the soil in which their personal history took root might yet have death to harvest.

Fear and Supposing: THE ZERO THEOREM

Terry Gilliam has a touch of the madman about him. It’s in the cursed behind-the-scenes strife that follows him from production to production, making it something of a miracle that he’s made as many movies as he has, let alone so many good and distinctive ones. It’s in his love of crowded set dressing and baroque effects that fill the frame with cacophonous visual stimulation, from the historical phantasmagoria of Time Bandits or The Adventures of Baron Munchausen to the sci-fi landscapes of 12 Monkeys and cracked “real world” of Fisher King and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It’s in his deep love and appreciation for characters too oddball and individualistic to fit in the society around them, no matter how desperately the world wants to crush them, even and especially if said crushing actually happens.

His latest film is The Zero Theorem, set in a dystopian future crowded with an exaggerated overstimulation that feels like a close cousin to his Brazil’s obsession with consumption, bureaucracy, and vents. Scripted by Pat Rushin and brought to vivid life by Gilliam and his team, this sci-fi world is like our own but worse, filled with screens everywhere you look, blaring advertisements and propaganda, some deviously personalized to float alongside you wherever you go. It’s part of a web of surveillance and work terminals, designed to make people nothing more than inputs, data to be crunched. At the center of this stimuli overdose is Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz). He’s reacted to his world by slipping into a waking coma of existential crisis.

It’s understandable. He just wonders what the point of it all is. Every day his boss (David Thewlis) informs him Mancom’s CEO (a white-haired Matt Damon) is demanding more data. A slogan on the wall: “Don’t Ask. Multitask.” Qohen would rather be reassigned to work from home, without having to commute a few blocks – past the billboards, warning signs, screens, and The Church of Batman the Redeemer – just to sit blankly in front of his screen. And so Qohen is given the thankless, impossible task of crunching numbers to solve The Zero Theorem. Everyone who has attempted it has failed, leaving their brains a scrambled mess. Qohen’s the last best hope, mostly because his brain’s already broken in.

There’s palpable madness to this world, as Qohen moves videogame cubes around and the insane world moves with a nonchalant logical illogic. Gilliam’s expert with madness, but at worst his films can get sick on that sensation. And so it is here. Waltz is quite good at selling the mood of a man in the process of shutting down. He thinks he’s due a phone call that’ll tell him his life’s purpose. It’s a quixotic hope, but it’s all he clings to. Meanwhile, The Zero Theorem is nothing less than an attempt to prove that “everything adds up to nothing,” as mindlessly hopeless as anything. The movie is one of fear and neurosis, as psychologically cramped as the mise-en-scène.

Here and there, though, it opens up by allowing more agreeably weird characters into the mix. Thewlis and Damon are charmers in a handful of scenes, but the movie really comes to life when Waltz is paired with a smart aleck teen intern (Lucas Hedges), who has a looseness and an externalized pushiness that pairs well with his co-star’s interiority. There’s also room for a sensual maybe-dream-girl (Mélanie Thierry) and a computerized shrink (Tilda Swinton, who at one point dons a bald cap and oversized sunglasses while rapping). And Gilliam’s design is always impressive, with droll visual bits of funny business. I especially liked the wall of prohibited activities behind a public bench, including a ban on smiling.

In the end, it’s a film I liked in theory more than in practice. It’s tediously overflowing with free-floating anxiety, generalized paranoid fear and sentimental confidence in man’s ability to float above society’s ills, no matter the delusion necessary to achieve said transcendence. But it’s trapped in a beautiful box of its own making. It looks great, but it is stuck without much of a narrative drive, little in the way of interesting character progression, and a world that starts to fall apart before it manages to get anywhere. I liked looking at it for a while, and enjoyed individual moments, but too often I felt myself straining to get on its wavelength. I felt like Qohen when asked if he’s having a good time. With visible discomfort, he answers, “Approximately.”

Catching Up on 2011: L’édition française

Heartbeats

Young Québécois actor Xavier Dolan’s second film as director, Heartbeats, is an assured and confident film that knows exactly what it wants to be and achieves it. He’s only 22. This is a wonderful film that captures a certain kind of precocious youth, indebted to the past in ways that heighten instead of dampen volatile youthful emotion in the present. A perfectly romantic atmosphere cribbed in part from Wong Kar Wai, and a muted Gregg Araki mixed with a French New Wave flavor, is here deployed in an agonizingly tantalizing story of one-sided infatuation. It's about a love triangle of sorts in which a gay man (Dolan) and his best girl friend (Monia Chokri) are both crushing on the same cute guy (Niels Schneider), but said crush object doesn’t seem to know it, or worse, knows it and is toying with them. The film follows the three characters as they circle each other, charting their small shifts, their cyclical emotional and physical attempts to draw closer, and the moody currents that drift them apart. However thin the plot is, Dolan, a terrifically promising director and a great screen presence, fills up the empty spaces with delirious style and a thick mood aching with emotions and impulses. This is a film about the romantic charge of absence, especially when mixed with the slight possibility, however impossible despite physical proximity, of attainment. Dolan has made his film in a bold style that’s as fresh as it is referential. It’s style as substance.

Potiche

About as pink and bubbly as a film can get without a physical problem with the print, François Ozon’s Potiche is a 1970’s period-piece women’s empowerment farce (both aspects are given their progressive expressions) that struggles but never quite collapses under the weight of its soap-opera elements. It’s a light confection through which some hugely talented French stars (no less than Catherine Deneuve among them) stride. Deneuve plays a stylish trophy wife who we first meet out for her morning jog decked out in pink athletic wear, moving at a pace that still allows her to admire all of the animals in the forest. Her husband (Fabrice Luchini) is the stingy, adulterous owner of a nearby umbrella factory who, after his striking employees confront him, collapses with a heart condition. This leaves his wife to shake off her trophy status and take charge at the company. Her new position creates differing reactions from their adult kids (Jérémie Renier and Judith Godrèche) and the factory’s secretary (Karin Viard) and brings her into contact with an old flame (Gérard Depardieu), all of which kicks off a narrative of self-discovery and a journey to fulfillment. Her story is wrapped inside a bright, light, farcical comedy and the film goes down happily and humorously.

The Princess of Montpensier

I feel compelled to call Bertrand Tavernier’s latest film, The Princess of Montpensier, based on a 1662 novel from Madame de Lafayette, lengthy. Despite the fact that I thoroughly enjoyed every minute, this is a film that feels long simply because it’s so tightly packed and richly spun. If anything, it’s surprising that it fits as much as it does in only 140 minutes. At times, Tavernier makes use of elisions in cutting between scenes, withholding information, allowing the audience to fill in gaps left by events and decisions unseen. In this way, the plot expands past the boundaries of screen time and feels richer for it. The film is a large-scale epic with terrific, muted melodrama played out against the backdrop of 16th century war between the Catholics and the Huguenots and the smaller, but no less important, scale of arranged marriages, true love, and broken hearts amongst dukes and duchesses and the children thereof. This particular story pivots upon Count de Chabannes (Lambert Wilson), who we meet in the opening scene in the heat of battle, a fight that causes him to lay down his arms and take up pacifism. This eventually leads him to the home of the Prince of Montpensier (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet), who asks him to help tutor his new wife, Marie (Mélanie Thierry), so that she may be presentable when the time comes that she must appear before the royal court. Marie, the titular princess, becomes the other major figure in the film. We first meet her before the wedding, flirting with the dashing Duke de Guise (Gaspard Ulliel). She loves him, but her father (Philippe Magnan) is persuaded by the elder Montpensier (Michel Vuillermoz) that his marriage proposal is most beneficial. And so, Marie becomes Princess of Montpensier while her heart still belongs to another. As the film unfolds, the characters are held captive by and rebel against the social constraints of their stations, struggling to assert or ignore their desires while submitting to sociopolitical and religious inevitabilities. Excellent acting across the board animates this handsomely gorgeous and refreshingly steady and restrained film of convincing period detail, complicated political intrigue, and piercing emotion. I found it a full and compelling experience.