Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another seems to take place in a continuous present, even though there is a sixteen-year gap between the opening scenes and the latter part of the film. Revolution is in the air, in a free-floating way: it’s a vibe, an energy, a plot strand, at some points a source of levity.
Loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, One Battle After Another is a tale of resistance and rebellion depicted as a combination of adventure–comedy and father–daughter relationship drama. Action propels the film in headlong spurts, from the opening setpiece to an extended, heady chase sequence towards the end; the comedy is gleeful and satirical, though heavy-handed at times. There’s a let-me-entertain-you spirit running through the movie that is sometimes expressed in dynamic, kinetic fashion, sometimes with cartoonish vigour, and sometimes through Anderson’s trademark needle drops.
The story begins outside an immigration detention camp on the US border with Mexico, where a radical group called the French 75 is about to carry out an armed break-in to free inmates. Leonardo DiCaprio is Pat, aka Rocketman, a nervy pyrotechnics specialist whose girlfriend, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), leads the charge into the facility. There she confronts Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) in a disconcerting, intense encounter that will have ramifications for the central characters for years to come.
In this first section, members of the French 75 are highly visible: holding up banks, raiding detention centres, setting off explosions in targeted spaces. Black women have a leadership role in the organisation, and Perfidia is a potent figure here, charismatic and reckless. She is radical royalty with a revolutionary lineage, and DiCaprio’s character seems to be constantly trailing in her wake. As their relationship enters a new stage — they are expecting a child together — things are about to fall apart in drastic fashion.
Whatever happened to the revolution? This is a question One Battle After Another toys with in various ways. In the first passage, the French 75 (who share a name with a champagne cocktail) are something like the Weather Underground; fast forward sixteen years and some things have changed but certain things remain the same.
DiCaprio’s character, now calling himself Bob, is out of the revolutionary picture. He is determined to stay off the grid, lying low with his teenage daughter in a secluded part of Northern California. It also seems as if the resistance has gone quiet. The formidable, magnetic Perfidia is not with the pair, and this is a loss in more ways than one. It almost feels as if she is too much for the movie, too unsettling and complicated for what Anderson is focused on.
We do, however, have Perfidia’s daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti in her feature debut). Spirited and pragmatic, she is the child as responsible adult, monitoring her father and trying to bring some order into the messy isolation of his life. She is aware of her parents’ history, although she doesn’t know the full story. There is grace and grit to Infiniti’s performance, amplified by the demands placed on her character when the past comes back to haunt both generations.
What hasn’t changed is the world they are living in. The looming background is the same: an America distilled into a world of ICE, repression, militarism and conspiracy. Close up, the vision is blackly comic, with the appearance of a covert, upper-echelon white supremacist group who call themselves The Christmas Adventurers and have Yuletide-themed passwords and catchphrases. And then there’s the persistence of the dangerous, often cartoonish figure of Lockjaw, the French 75 nemesis with a particular interest in Perfidia and, by extension, Bob and Willa.
Within the narrative, Penn and DiCaprio appear as foils and hard-versus-soft physical-comedy opposites. Penn, wiry and manic, projects an angular viciousness and threat. He’s a monster mass of tics, with a combover quiff, a twisted mouth and movement that has a mechanical, Terminator action-figure quality. (It is interesting to wonder what Joaquin Phoenix, originally cast as Lockjaw, would have made of the character.)
DiCaprio, by contrast, is loose and tetchy all at once: the anxious activist of the first part of the film has become a well-meaning, chaotic dad, numbed on weed and alcohol, crashing on the couch in a plaid dressing gown, cueing up The Battle of Algiers and tuning out. He is often defined by dad-joke moments, stressing out over pronouns. struggling with technology. Even when he is galvanised into action he’s fumbling, awkward, haplessly unprepared for what he’s hurling himself into.
It turns out there are still dissidents, activists and resistance fighters, some new, some from the first part of the film, even if their activities are barely visible to begin with. Anderson gives them varying weight and significance. As Deandra, Regina Hall makes a fleeting but welcome return to conduct an extraction mission at a school gym; Benicio del Toro plays a chill martial arts instructor who also runs a kind of underground railroad for the undocumented; there are weed-growing nuns and a rebel phone hotline that has no patience with desperate callers who can’t recall the crucial password.
One Battle After Another, as its title seems to suggest, might seem like a work about the aftermath or the gradual evolution of organised resistance, a phenomenon that’s treated with a mixture of engagement, comic distance and a kind of scepticism. But ultimately Anderson is less interested in this than he is in the notion of protection and redemption within the family. A sentimental streak emerges in One Battle After Another; what it offers at the end is not revolution or resolution, but reassurance and a kind of consolation.
French director Anne Fontaine’s Bolero is the story of a work and a life, a deftly drawn biographical study with a restrained, thoughtful approach that also incorporates some inventive and unexpected elements. It revolves around the famous orchestral composition that gives the film its name, a piece of music almost a century old that is said to be performed somewhere in the world every fifteen minutes.
The opening credits provide a montage of Bolero interpretations over the decades, a testament to the extraordinary staying power and versatility of this repetitive, insistent piece of music. The 1928 composition for a large orchestra has a protean quality: it can be explored, for example, by a cool jazz trio, a Mexican cumbia outfit, a funk ballet, a brass big band or a French comedy duo. And films such as Allegro Non Troppo (1976) and 10 (1979) have explored its possibilities in very different ways.
In her portrait of its unlikely creator, French composer, conductor and pianist Maurice Ravel (Raphaël Personnaz), Fontaine shows us a fastidious, driven and private figure, haunted by small obsessions and anxieties, a fraught perfectionist with a dry wit and an intriguing relationship to ideas of success and failure.
Personnaz gives a quietly engaging performance that combines an inward-looking temperament with an openness to inspiration, influenced by everything from birdsong to jazz. An early scene, repeated later, shows him visiting a factory, fascinated and almost overwhelmed by this “mechanical symphony,” by the rhythm and repetitions of the machinery at work.
A heightened sound design plays a significant role in the film. Fontaine seems to suggest that Ravel experienced what would now be called an autonomous sensory meridian response, most notably in the pleasure he takes in listening to the sound of a woman slowly putting on a pair of satin gloves.
Bolero, it turns out, had a protracted gestation, constantly deferred amid the composer’s uncertainties and apprehensions. The composition was the response to a commission from flamboyant dancer and choreographer Ida Rubinstein (Jeanne Balibar). She is one of several significant female figures in his life, including his devoted mother (Anne Alvaro), whose Basque heritage was important to him, and pianist Marguerite Long (Emmanuelle Devos), a supportive friend and collaborator. Misia Sert (Doria Tillier), a famous muse and patron, is another to whom he is drawn but unable to get close.
There is very little known about Ravel’s private life — a note at the end of the film acknowledges that it occasionally departs from the historical record — but it’s the creative life, with all its chaotic uncertainties, hard work, unexpected challenges and unpredictable rewards, that is at the heart of this film. •
