Netflix released the spike Lee film “Five one blood” (Da 5 Bloods) about African-American veterans of the Vietnam war, half a century later returned to the field of past battles in search of a chest of gold and own forgotten lives. Says Julia Siegelman.It is hard to imagine a more appropriate moment for the release of the new spike Lee film: the words Black lives matter sound from the screen in unison with the voice of the streets, and the many documentary inserts clearly explains that the protests have arisen not on an empty place. This, of course, not a deliberate exploitation of the agenda (the shooting started in 2019), but not a coincidence: the movie that black life is important, Whether removes about life.Four sturdy old — Floor (DelRoy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (norm Lewis) and Melvin (Isaiah Whitlock Jr.) — arrive in Ho Chi Minh city, where last time they visited in 1971, when the city was still called Saigon. Then there were five of them, but their “blood brother” and the commander of their little band, Norman, nicknamed Storm Standards (Chadwick Bosman), lay limp in the ground somewhere in the jungle, staying forever young. Now former soldiers want to find his remains to bring them back home and buried properly, with full military honors. However, this goal is not unique: there, beside the body of Norman, they buried a box of gold bars that the CIA plane was carrying to pay for the help of the North Vietnamese of the lahus in the war with the Viet Cong, but were shot down on the way.Over the years, three friends completely adapted to normal civilian life (Eddie and all reached a true American success, becoming the owner of a large chain of dealerships), and only Paul, it seems, never returned from combat: the ghosts of war haunt him in his sleep, and the return to the “We” begin to come real. Besides, he was the only one who voted for trump (which spike Lee clearly considers it a sign of mental illness) and wears a cap that says Make America great again”, which in the course of the film will switch from one head to another, symbolically denoting a change not only in the fate of the characters, but not much in the world political environment.For Flooring, Vietnam tied his son David (Jonathan Majers), who learned about the gold from hacked his father’s correspondence. So the heroes again becomes five, and together they embark on a new journey to the heart of darkness. This path stretches a long 2.5 hours, managing several times to change the rhythm and genre character from an adventure movie about a treasure hunt through family drama, tied to relations of Gender and of David, to the tragedy of people broken by the war. Here again comes to the fore Gender, in fact the main character, whose crazy monologues on the verge of nonsense — the most powerful and emotionally charged moments. But the victim’s found on both sides��HN front — from radical Whether least have to admit that the white and yellow life is important too, but here they are. All this in a characteristic manner the Director generously interspersed with political speeches directly to the camera and chronicle the illustrations, as well as with regards to almost everything ever made “Vietnamese films”.The picture 2008 “Miracle St. Anna,” Lee had returned the right memory of the African-American soldiers of world war II. In the new film he’s doing the same with the Vietnamese myth, enshrined in the American collective consciousness dozens of films, most notably “Apocalypse now,” Coppola, with whom “Five are of one blood” is constantly ironically echoes. Despite the fact that blacks made up about a third who fought in Vietnam the Americans, in the conventional narrative about the war they were at best in the background, the Director says with his usual raging fury and directness of the poster. And in the last frame, after the “happy end”, don’t forget to remind that the war is not over. And just open any daily news to appreciate that he was right.
