Why The '70s Set 'BlacKkKlansman' Is As Timely As Ever

BLACKKKLANSMAN

BlacKkKlansman is, as its title tips, about an African-American detective infiltrating his local Ku Klux Klan chapter. “Based on some fo’ real, fo’ real shit”, Spike Lee’s latest joint — his 26th feature film — is set in the 1970s, but has clearly been made for its contemporaneous resonance, the similarities between past and present forever hammered home. Its KKK members chant ‘America First!’, its David Duke (Topher Grace!) is out to help ‘America achieve greatness again’, and an uncannily-prescient cop prophesies that, in the future, a politician will smuggle racist rhetoric into a Presidential campaign under the guise of immigration policy.

To really rub this in, Lee finishes his otherwise-feelgood film with a brutal post-script: unvarnished video from the frontlines of 2017’s Charlottesville white-power marches and counter-protests; including a car fatally careening into anti-racism protestors, the film dedicated to the woman, Heather Heyer, who died thereafter. Though telling a tale from four decades ago, BlacKkKlansman’s timeliness is underlined on the release schedule: the film coming out on the one-year anniversary of this modern-day race-relations horrorshow (and, of course, Trump’s playing-to-his-supporters “both sides” commentary).

This ending matches the film’s opening, where we find Alec Baldwin (an actor best known, these days, for his Trump impression) as some angry 1950s rabble-rouser orating a pro-KKK propaganda film; these bookends connecting a thread of outright All-American racism from post-war to present.

Propaganda, and cinema, serves as ongoing subtext through the film: Gone With The Wind and D.W. Griffith’s Klan-heroising Birth Of A Nation rolled for their racism; '70s Blaxploitation pictures parsed for their politics of representation. Lee is also in cinema-history conversation with himself: when he wheels out his trademark ‘floating double-dolly shot’, late, it’s like playing an old hit for the fans.

In the middle of all this meta-text, there’s a rock-solid, rollicking, oft-comic undercover movie. In white-and-leafy Colorado, a pair of detectives black (John David Washington, oft channelling his dad, Denzel) and white (Adam Driver), team up to worm their way into the KKK. Washington is the first African-American cop on the local force, and, in turn, this marks a moment in changing social values in post-segregation America. But, the film — based on a memoir by Ron Stallworth, the real-life officer at the centre of this actually-happened story — takes it easy on the police force as institution. Though the local black-power groups and student-activists — including Laura Harrier as Washington’s love-interest — face police harassment, and rail against the institutionalised racism practiced by ‘pigs’, in the end it’s a few-bad-apples scenario, with the overtly-racist cops duly taken down like the overtly-racist KKK types.

With Washington talking by the phone to the KKK, and to Duke, Driver ‘plays’ him in-person, as undercover operative; in league with a crew of local yokels whose most violent member (Jasper Paakkonen, verily running back his work from the Finnish film Heart Of A Lion) serves as the loose-cannon of narrative antagonism. As the kinda-ridiculous infiltration-plan gets ever deeper, the tension/drama — as always, in undercover movies — hinges on the possibility of, and moment when, their cover is blown.

It gets blown at a great narrative-converging, action-film climax in which secrets are outed, plots are enacted, and a bomb is set to go off; various parties racing through various streets, the sense of a ticking-clock conveyed not by, y’know, a ticking-clock countdown, but through the editing, the momentum, and, finally, the climax. It’s a moment of literal explosion to match the figurative explosiveness; Lee, as ever, at his best when detonating the powderkeg of American race relations.

SUBMERGENCE

It’s been a long time since Wim Wenders made a meaningful narrative feature, but Submergence might be his most middlebrow movie yet. Though it’s a film about unusual humans going through extraordinary circumstances — an intelligence operative held captive by a jihadi group in Somalia; a bio-mathematician in the Greenland Sea diving, in a submersible, to the ocean floor, to chart oxygen quantities — the film is so familiar as to be somehow banal: it’s a grand romance starring two attractive film-stars.

Here, the officer/gentleman is James McAvoy, the scientist Alicia Vikander. They meet at a seaside B&B on a pebbly Normandy beach; soon enough, they’re literally making out in crashing waves (the passion!). But their passions aren’t reserved for each other: each proselytises the virtues of their chosen professions, seeing them as opportunity to make a difference in the world; with Vikander, that means getting to wax lyrical not just about the ocean’s briny depths, but fascinating facts and life-of-the-planet stats. Each is working in search of truth and meaning. Wenders’ best device is to have them talking to-camera, audience placed in the perspective of their respective paramour; seeing the wonder of these characters with romantic eyes.

Eventually their respective jobs take them away to missions military and scientific, dragging them apart when romantic convention demands they should be together. What this means is that, rather than the narrative fully inhabiting their unique experiences — in either hostage-situation or deep-sea voyage — it hangs in the middle; the two pining for the other over distance, fated-love driven apart by dark turns of destiny. What may’ve worked on the page, in J.M. Ledgard’s novel, plays, on screen, as two A-list actors staring longingly into the distance, character-interiority never breaking through their film-star façade. What, ultimately, results is a standard-issue take on tragic-romance and widescreen matinee, Submergence playing not just as old-fashioned, but uninspired.

ON CHESIL BEACH

In another literary device that works better on page that on-screen: On Chesil Beach is a film largely set over six hours, in which the incidents of this ‘present’ spiral out into associations and events from the past; and, then, leap forward into glimpses of a distant, unconvincing-aging-makeup future.

The present is 1962, where Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle play a pair of newlyweds settling into a hotel by the titular English beach. The patterned wallpaper and carpet, maroon velour furniture, and gross-looking meat-and-three-veg dinner let you know we’re in a distant, dated time; a prim-and-proper England in which someone’s ‘wedding night’ meant first consummation, and likely lost virginity.

Their first sexual experience — depicted, here, in sustained fashion — is so awkward, so awful, that it immediately calls the whole union into question; sexual dissatisfaction provoking immediate resentments and unravelling all manner of shame. It’s an odd incident to see a film narrative centred around; there no clear lessons to take from it, nor easy emotional response.

Ian McEwan adapted his own novella for the screenplay, and debutante director Dominic Cooke is at his best when inhabiting the in-the-moment experiences and emotions of this tragic coitus, then charting the conflicts that arise in its immediate wake. There’s gentle humour, palpable tension, and hints at things repressed (which is, indeed, the film’s greater theme). But when On Chesil Beach goes back and forth in time, it loses the lacerating drama and smothering claustrophobia of its ‘present’, hewing closer to the realm of tasteful period-piece. This makes for a film that is hard to categorise, and not easy to forget, but not entirely successful either.

C’EST LA VIE!

It’s like an episode of Party Down, only far less funny, and way more normcore. The latest film for inveterate crowdpleasers Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano (the dudes who made the horrid The Intouchables), C’est La Vie! is almost entirely set at one function, a grand wedding in an old-timey country mansion, amongst its events-organisers, caterers, waiters, band, photographers. Working to the exacting specifications of a veritable groomzilla (Benjamin Lavernhe), a perpetually-pissy boss (Jean-Pierre Bacri, his latest in a long line of on-screen grumps) tries to whip his rag-tag crew of employees into shape. Caricatures, hijinks, disasters, romance, and learned-lessons all ensue, but little in the way of actual real comedy. It’s pure light-entertainment, vaguely enjoyable but not at all memorable.