One Battle After Another movie review: Paul Thomas Anderson film is as timely as it is tragic

Its “revolutionaries”, led by Perfidia (a magnetic Teyana Taylor), who sneak in with heavy artillery to free immigrants imprisoned at the Mexican border, call themselves the ‘French 75’. The name could stand in both for a rapid-fire field gun that helped change the course of WWI for the Allied Powers; or for the cocktail drink served in that evergreen WWII film Casablanca. If Perfidia and her gang, including her puppy-dog bomb-maker boyfriend Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio), are aware of the weight of that history, they don’t dwell on it.

Perfidia declares her motto as “free borders, free choices, free bodies and freedom from fear”. No one else gets a word in. But if even Perfidia has thought that through, there is no evidence of that. More than beliefs, what French 75 are swimming on are bullets and ballast – which means unsurprisingly a very short road for them.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s vision is unsparing, for both sides in this apparently eternal face-off between the rebels and the system — even as life carries on, unironically.

That means that even as governments (16 years apart) keep tightening screws on the border, and routinely send armed forces in for round-up raids, throwing around acronyms that roll out as smoothly off the tongue as ICE, there is hardly a pause in the immigrant flow, or the network oiling it.

That means that even as White supremacists in their glass-and-wood mansions plot their latest “purity” campaigns, they can’t do without the “wets and stinkies” coming across the border and keeping their farms running.

That means that pregnancy and domesticity must extinguish revolutionary fires. Or, if they don’t, women like Perfidia must stomp out on their children, fulminating about their spouses’ “lack of originality” and protesting against not being “udder babies”.

The irreversible melting of pots that is America is nowhere more evident than in the love and lust that binds Perfidia, Pat and Colonel Lockjaw, played by Sean Penn with ramrod military precision, from the thinning strands atop his hair to the lifts he wears hidden in his shoes. The only thing rippling about him are his muscles, and his unbridled passion against his will for the very “Black” Perfidia.

The irony of these real and imagined borders renting America is captured by Anderson in all its fullness – from its absurdity to its tragedy.

So Pat, his revolutionary days far behind him, is now a middle-class dad in frumpy nightgowns and a limp, greasy ponytail, raising a grumpy 16-year-old daughter Willa (an impressive Infiniti). When the past catches up with him again, and his drugs-and-alcohol addled brain can no longer remember the codewords enshrined in French 75’s revolutionary text – meant for “secure communication” between the comrades – the worst epithet Pat can come up with is: “You f…ing liberals”.

He can barely hide his impatience with the many pronouns one has to remember now, but also hardly registers the sanguinity with which a fellow traveller, Sergio (a very cool Benicio Del Toro), is conducting his own little rebellions – of smuggling people of Mexican origin like him in and secreting them to safety.

A car chase where things should have ideally come to an end is a thing of mounting beauty and suspense – a road cutting through an endless landscape of mid-land America, dipping up and down, shining like a mirage at times, and threatening like a blind turn at others. It’s quite like the American dream itself, always beckoning, almost within reach.

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Anderson ends up overstretching too, going in for an exposition that this film doesn’t need.

Tish Harrison Warren said it in two lines: “Everyone wants a revolution. No one wants to do the dishes.” Those are still very good lines.

One Battle After Another movie director: Paul Thomas Anderson
One Battle After Another movie cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Chase Infiniti, Teyana Taylor, Benicio Del Toro, Regina Hall
One Battle After Another movie rating: 4.5 stars

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