The American film, released this fall 2025, One battle after anotherThe second film, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, enjoyed some cinematic success, ranking 18the at the French box office that year (with almost 1,5 million viewers). After blockbusters and big-budget popular productions like Les Tuche, it was one of the first "serious" films recommended by Parisian critics: one should say praised, by the entire French critical establishment, right and left, woke and anti-woke, with the only press outlet giving it just 3 out of 5 stars being La CroixFinally, the film is featured in their annual rankings as one of the best films of the year by major newspapers in the area.
A first dissonance appeared, however, in the audience ratings, which were far less favorable than the critics'. For several weeks, the audience rating rarely exceeded 2,5 out of 5, with the anti-woke audience leaving more than reserved after this lamentable spectacle, a very well-executed self-promotion of wokism. Only Leonardo DiCaprio's good performance—a revolutionary capable of self-deprecation—dared to use irony against the most grotesque aspects of wokism in armed struggle. But word of mouth having done its work, the audience woke friendly It filled theaters at the expense of its competitors, so the audience rating climbed back up to around 3,5-4 out of 5. However, the film did not achieve the expected success given its cost ($130 million budget, compared to $50 million for Dracula, the most expensive French film of the year!) and its cast (with a world-class star at the peak of his art, and Sean Penn as an extra, in the role of the sinister Colonel Lockjaw – aka Tetanus).
So what is this all about? A revolutionary Californian antifa group (the "French 75"!), whose goal is to free detained migrants, attacks public institutions (including banks and the power grid), even going so far as to plant a potentially deadly bomb. The group's leader is an African American woman (the aptly named Perfidia) whose revolutionary vulgarity tramples the codes of petit-bourgeois propriety, culminating in the obscene staging of a sexual encounter with the perverse white cop Lockjaw (Penn), who is attracted to this creature and dreams of eliminating him. She ultimately kills another cop. Having fulfilled his transgressive fantasy, Lockjaw frees the revolutionary, who is unknowingly pregnant. Eight months later, as the French 75's actions intensify, a scene of assassination with a Kalashnikov placed on the belly of an eight-months-pregnant Perfidia is presented as a climactic event! The scene is set: war on institutions, unbridled vulgarity, vengeful black power, a perverse and murderous white cop, revolution and eradicating neo-feminism, which pushes Perfidia in struggle to abandon the daughter born from her relationship with Lockjaw.
After the revolutionary gang's destruction, everyone scatters. The little girl is raised by Ghetto Pat (aka DiCaprio), who believes he is her father. We meet them again 16 years later. The cop and his biracial daughter—with her virginal innocence—have been overprotected and have lived apart from society, the father having become paranoid and addicted to drugs. Conversely, Lockjaw, through his fight against immigration, has risen through the ranks: now a colonel, he joins a secret society, the "Christmas Adventurers Club" (sic, Christian=fascist), a group of very nasty white supremacists whom the prevailing conspiracy theories attribute to a hidden power of leadership in Trump's America. Since Trump is never mentioned, all of this remains crudely subliminal.
The only problem is that he's consumed by remorse for having slept with a Black woman, a disqualifying circumstance for membership in this secret society worthy of the Camorra. But his daughter is alive, protected by the old revolutionary. Lockjaw sets out to find his daughter, eliminate her, and "whitewash" his past. Against the backdrop of a mass escape of undocumented immigrants, the hunt goes so wrong that Lockjaw is finally unmasked after a DNA test proves his paternity! This treachery earns him – reductio ad Hitlerium The ultimate irony – to end up gassed in a mini gas chamber by his friends, the "Christmas Adventurers." It is indeed well known that the gas chamber is the standard method used by white supremacists – necessarily Nazis – to eliminate traitors to their cause!
Let's skip over the episode of the "revolutionary convent" of nuns to which Willa, the daughter of Perfidia and Lockjaw, was sent—a further occasion for unashamed anti-Catholic hatred that may have slightly dampened the critic's enthusiasm. The cross. After numerous crimes and assassinations, Willa and her adoptive father fall in love. Having discovered her mother's identity in this saga, the young woman opportunely opens, on her 18th birthday, a letter her mother had written to her after her birth, when she had just betrayed her comrades in the struggle to save her own skin (perfidia at work?). In it, her mother proclaims her love and the necessity of revolutionary struggle. Her daughter bursts into tears, and, in a perfectly fitting American happy ending, she packs her bags and heads off to join an ongoing revolutionary demonstration! The circle is complete, and revolutionary morality is preserved.
This cool and enjoyable film, peppered with successful scenes—like the roller coaster sequence in the Nevada countryside, though often too long—which doesn't shy away from any of the anti-reactionary and pro-antifa clichés, seems to have delighted the well-meaning French public. Is this the price of our past revolutionary glory, perpetuated by the memory of the "French 75"? Is it the excess of "wokism," which has ended up normalizing this mix of feminism and racialism fused into antifascism? Is it our national anti-American passion reincarnated as anti-Trumpism, inevitably white supremacist and Nazi? Is it a cheap anti-Catholicism, reminding us that every institution is by nature coercive and must be fought? Or is it simply our inexhaustible reservoir of guilt that pushes us to validate all the actions of the supposedly oppressed, even when they shoot at us? Or simply DiCaprio's good looks, who excels in this film? In any case, if wokism were a film, it would be One battle after another.
