Spike Lee takes black America back to ’nam; Nordic noir at its brightest; and a British avant-period drama

DA 5 BLOODS There could hardly be a more signi.cant moment for a new Spike Lee joint. As the killing of George Floyd leaves America in turmoil, Lee’s Netflix release Da 5 Bloods looks back at the Vietnam war and asks what it meant for black America.

Da 5 Bloods: (l-r) Isiah Whitlock Jr, Norm Lewis, Clarke Peters, Delroy Lindo, Jonathan Majors

Movies about the war have tended to cast African-American soldiers as onlookers to the tragedies of white heroes, whether it’s Laurence Fishburne’s character in Apocalypse Now! or Forest Whitaker in Platoon. Da 5 Bloods corrects that tendency, and offers a critical commentary on it, in its story of four black veterans who return to Vietnam today on a personal mission - locate a cache of gold bullion and bring back the body of Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman), their heroic and idealistic platoon leader. One man in particular, Paul (Delroy Lindo), is haunted by visions of the past and of Norman. He’s the most complex character - embittered, damaged and politically conflicted, heading out on his mission, and towards breakdown, in a MAGA cap.

The film starts dazzlingly as the men rediscover a changed Vietnam, with Newton Thomas Sigel’s photography blazing with neon colour. Throughout, Lee uses his characteristic formal invention - switching colours, textures and aspect ratio for the battle fashbacks and liberally inserting archive footage (including speeches by Malcom X, Angela Davis and others) plus images and captions, by way of visual footnotes.

Da 5 Bloods starts out with formidable purpose and promise but loses momentum as it becomes a somewhat messily executed, over-extended adventure yarn involving Vietnamese officers, a land mine expert (Mélanie Thierry) and a sinister white-suited fixer (Jean Reno). All this obscures what is most compelling about the heroes and their relationships; in fact, two of the quartet (Norm Lewis, Isiah Whitlock Jr) are under-developed as characters, while Lee over-indulges Lindo’s increasingly hothouse performance. In contrast, while there’s not that much Boseman, his charismatically intense moments bring the movie to life, while as the careworn Otis, Clarke Peters gives an impeccably nuanced performance. Soundtracked to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and a distractingly florid Terence Blanchard score, Da 5 Bloods is one of Lee’s most ambitious yet, but it lacks the bite and provocation of 2018’s BlacKkKlansman. Still, it undeniably rewrites the rules for Vietnam war movies, and it’s just as undeniably an essential watch.

A WHITE, WHITE DAY We routinely talk about Scandi-noir, but in much of the Nordic crime drama that most catches the imagination, there’s little noir at all: instead of darkness, these films and TV series are often steeped in cold Northern sun. That’s the case with Icelandic feature A White, White Day, defined by stark, all-exposing visibility.

Strictly speaking, Hlynur Pálmason’s film is less a thriller than a ruthless psychological drama. Ingvar Sigurdsson plays Ingimundur, police chief in a rural community, on leave following the death of his wife in a car accident. Busy renovating a house and looking after his eight-year-old granddaughter Salka, Ingimundur holds his life together - until he suspects that his wife was having an affair. The psyche of this detached, taciturn man starts to unravel - and the Icelandic daylight pitilessly illuminates the film’s examination of imploding masculinity.

Sigurdsson is magnetic throughout, Ingimundur’s repressed rage precariously held in the balance against his strong, calm presence as a tender family man. And as Salka, Ída Mekkin Hlynsdóttir - daughter of Pálmason - has a winning solemnity that suggests a character, and a young actress, with a lucid, quizzical awareness of the world around her. The drama builds to two nerve-fraying moments of truth. There’s also inspired sour comedy involving Ingimudur’s sessions with an inept psychotherapist.

The film brilliantly invents its own unsettling visual language - with montages of diverse objects that tell their own enigmatic story, and jump-cut sequences showing Ingimundur’s house in all weathers as the landscape changes around it. This is an art film of considerable innovation, but it’s also intensely gripping as a thriller, and confirms second-time feature-maker Pálmason as a director of blazing originality.

LYNN+LUCY. Coolly unnerving and intensely controlled, this debut feature by writer-director Fyzal Boulifa is a confident, original entry in the field of British social realism. Set in Harlow New Town, it’s the story of two youngish women, former school friends, now both mothers: blue-haired Lucy (Nichola Burley), still not fully emerged from her wild child years, and Lynn (Roxanne Scrimshaw), the friend who settled down before her. Lynn - trying to forge a new independent life for herself - finds her loyalties severely tested.

Narratively simple but extremely complex in emotional and moral terms, this moving - and at moments, harrowing - drama owes much of its power to extraordinary lead performances. And while the excellent Burley has is known as a British TV and film regular, there’s a revelation in absolute newcomer Scrimshaw, who navigates the sometimes alarming landscape of Lynn’s decisions and emotional shifts with huge insight and subtlety. The support cast is excellent too, not least Jennifer Lee Moon as beauty salon boss Janelle, a woman who seems to have modelled her very being on an Instagram/Love Island template of femininity. An elliptical storytelling style, and Taina Galis’s spare camerawork in a boxy 4:3 ratio enhance the impact. It’s a simple, understated film, but it could leave you shaking.

Da 5 Bloods undeniably rewrites the rules for Vietnam war movies

THE GIRL WITH A BRACELET The girl in Stéphane Demoustier’s French drama is 16-year-old Lise (Melissa Guers), arrested on suspicion of murdering her best friend. When she’s standing in the dock, Lise and her middle-class parents realise that she is being investigated not just for her suspected actions but for her nonconformist sexuality, and for her supposedly incriminating impassivity; like Meursault, the anti-hero of Camus’s novel The Outsider, Lise simply doesn’t give the performance that society expects.

This is a quietly gripping piece, a forensic investigation into attitudes and motives with echoes of a classic French tradition: the films of Claude Chabrol and Henri-Georges Clouzot, the novels of Georges Simenon. The claustrophic action is restricted largely to the family home and the courtroom - with an extended single-take opening shot on a beach, absolutely in the Michael Haneke league when it comes to setting a tone of chill unease. The film centres around a mesmerisingly opaque lead by newcomer Guers, with stalwarts Chiara Mastroianni and Roschdy Zem on fine form as her parents. The scene stealer, however, is Anaïs Demoustier - also the director’s sister - an under-rated regular in French cinema best known for François Ozon’s The New Girlfriend. While often superb, she has never had the edge she does here as the case’s prosecuting attorney, with a chill ruthlessness that gives the film a backbone of steel.

Director Spike Lee, left, on the set of Da 5 Bloods

FANNY LYE DELIVER’D A intriguingly nonconformist outsider in British cinema, writer-director Thomas Clay (The Great Ecstasy Of Robert Carmichael,SoiCowboy) returns after 12 years’ absence with the singular Fanny Lye Deliver’d. Never likely to take the well-beaten Britfilm route, this committed cinephile and experimenter has now made a 17th-century drama about a Puritan family facing extreme consequences when they give shelter to a young couple on the run. Maxine Peake plays Fanny, Charles Dance her severe authoritarian husband, and Freddie Fox and Tanya Reynolds the duo who shake up their quiet existence with sex, theological argumentation and ’shroom-laced mock communion wine.

The film comes across perplexingly as a heritage home invasion drama (like Haneke’s Funny Games, but with big-brimmed hats) crossed with a crypto-Western. UK film cultists will detect traces of revered Civil War chiller Witchfnder General, and it’s hard to take the drama entirely on its own terms when the film is framed so knowingly as a salute to 1960s/’70s British cinema. It’s also a very prolix drama, laced heavily with debate on beliefs of the period, with Fox’s alternately menacing and charismatic intruder endlessly spouting theological rhetoric. And, given that the drama is about Fanny’s deliverance from patriarchy, it’s a little discordant that his part in her liberation involves quite so much blustery Godsplaining.

Dance is particularly good, showing much simmering forbearance as his character endures horriffic indignities. But it’s a rough-edged film, awkwardly larded with voiceover, while Clay’s own orchestral score can be overbearing. Still, the period detail is amply evocative, and it’s one of few recent British features to get ambitious with landscape, captured in striking long takes by legendary cinematographer Yorgos Arvanitis.

JONATHAN ROMNEY

REVIEWED THIS MONTH

DA 5 BLOODS

Directed by Spike Lee

Starring Delroy Lindo, Chadwick

Boseman Streaming from June 12

7/10

A WHITE, WHITE DAY

Directed by Hlynur Pàlmason

Starring Ingvar Sigurdsson, Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir

Streaming from July 3

9/10

LYNN + LUCY

Directed by Fyzal Boulifa

Starring Nichola Burley, Roxanne

Scrimshaw Streaming from July 2

8/10

THE GIRL WITH A BRACELET

Directed by Stéphane Demoustier

Starring Roschdy Zem, Melissa Guers

Streaming from June 26

7/10

FANNY LYE DELIVER’D

Directed by Thomas Clay

Starring Maxine Peake, Charles Dance

Streaming from June 26 Cert 18

6/10

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