Gender is also racial: early in the film, Perfidia, who is black, asks Pat, who is white, if he likes black women. When she orders Lockjaw, also white, to get into a stance, he simply calls her “sweet thang.” And at a critical moment, Lockjaw captures Perfidia, but promises to let her go if she meets him in a motel room. She goes through with it, keeping the date a secret from Pat, and becomes pregnant without knowing which man is the father. She and Pat name the baby, a girl, Charlene, and Pat ends up raising her alone after Perfidia is captured, reports the group, and enters witness protection. Pat and Charlene give up false identities and flee. Sixteen years later, they live together in a sanctuary city called Bucktan Cross; Charlene, now called Willa (played by a brilliant young actress named Chase Infinity), is in high school, and Pat, now called Bob, does nothing but drugs, drinking and partying. Suddenly, Lockjaw, now a colonel, decides to capture Willa and hunt down Bob, and the rest of the film follows his motives for pursuing him, Bob and Willa's attempts to evade capture, their separation, and their courageous fight to reunite.
One of the best aspects of classic films about radical actions at the time they actually happened, such as Michelangelo Antonioni.Zabriskie Point” and Robert Kramer's Ice are debates. What it takes, both ideologically and practically, to organize a group to undertake violent action is fascinating because it is inseparable from the core energy that gives the drama its emotional charge – the transformation of passion into action. There is nothing like it in One Battle After Another. Factionality, doctrine, ground rules, justifications are not in Anderson's film have meanings, which means that the actions of the French 75 take place in an intellectual void. The revolution is perceived more as a given than as an achievement, and it is closer to a club than to an army. The political situation that Anderson illustrates in the early events of the film is essentially one of vibrations. However, the film's atmosphere is not entirely trivial because it resonates. painfully close to the current mood. Despite the lack of political specificity, the analogies are clear: Anderson depicts the police and military combining to detain non-white people in concentration camps, and repressive and normative power allows the official to satisfy his passions by abusing power.
While watching the first part of One Battle After Another, I was reminded of a scene from another great film about the radical left and their plans for revolutionary violence: Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise. There, a woman named Veronique (Anne Wiazemsky), a member of the Parisian cell, accidentally meets a philosophy professor (real-life philosopher Francis Jeanson, playing himself). She tells him about her group's plans to shut down their university with bombs; he tells her that she and her associates will be caught long before they manage to do so. She reminds him that during the Algerian War he was pursued by the police (Jeanson actually worked with pro-Algerian activists in France) and managed to escape. Jeanson explains: “Because there were many sympathizers among the French population. Because even those who did not completely support Algerian independence did not condemn us.” He continues: “Your action will lead nowhere unless it is supported by the community, the class.”
This debate and these lines illustrate what is at stake in the sixteen-year gap between the two parts of One Battle After Another. If there is an element of ridicule in the early depictions of the French 75s and their campaign of violence, it is rooted in the idea of a vanguard that, far from being rooted in society, plans to make a revolution of its own and pretends to lead society to radical changes for which there is nothing resembling consensus – and through tactics that receive even less support or sympathy.
Very little has changed, says the voiceover, in the sixteen years between the dispersal of the French 75 and Bob and Willa's confrontation with military violence at Bactan Cross. The voiceover is both truthful and ironic. Of course, some things haven't changed: the government's relentless persecution of immigrants; the army works closely with a heavily militarized police force and still carries out brutal raids under Lockjaw's command; The US is still under hostile occupation by its own government, and the country is under siege from within. But other things have changed. In the Baktan Cross there is an organized resistance that is deeply rooted in society. Its leader, martial arts teacher Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), has what he calls “a little Latin American Harriet Tubman situation happening at my house.” When military forces come for the immigrants, organized protests occur, as well as a carefully planned escape operation. (This sense of informal consensus contrasts with a fascinating and symbolic aspect of the film: the absence of electoral politics. There are no parties, no campaigns, no speeches by presidents or other officials, no clear connection between the machinery of democracy, however misused, and the sorry state of the nation.)
