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At his best, Spike Lee is a filmmaker whose work can feel relevant and urgent. Not only does he seem to capture the present moment in his films, but he makes sure that moment endures. Do the Right Thing (1989) was released 31 years ago, yet as Lee’s recent short film that he posted to Instagram shows, the content still chillingly resonates with our own society today. Da 5 Bloods is a major example of Lee at his best.
In the film, four African-American Vietnam veterans return to the country they once fought in to retrieve the body of their fallen squad leader, Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman) and bring him home, while also looking to uncover the large bounty of gold he helped them to hide. The premise is relatively straightforward, yet, it is Lee’s visual and formal playfulness that make this film shine so brightly. Instead of telling the story in simple chronological order, Lee splits the film across at least four different aspect ratios to distinguish the narrative focus of each point in the film. Da 5 Bloods begins and closes with archival footage contextualising the Vietnamese conflict and the specific African-American experience of that conflict, as well the heightened atmosphere of extensively documented systemic racism that was taking place on US soil at the time. There is something hideously contemporary about seeing archival footage of the National Guard attacking protestors. A more traditional widescreen ratio is used for the veterans’ return to Saigon, while the flashback scenarios are compressed into 4:3 and become grainier to cinematically signify the past. Poignantly, the actors are not de-aged à la Robert De Niro for the flashbacks, showing that the memory is a living trauma for the characters in their old age. This has particular resonance for one character who is very clearly emotionally scarred from the conflict, and slowly begins to lose his grip on reality. The fourth ratio fills the screen as the characters return to the jungle. Not content with leaving the visual fun to that, Lee often uses inventive diegetic transitions (such as a motorbike zooming across the screen) to adjust the ratio and smoothly merge the narrative contexts. As a cinephile, this visual flair is a delight to watch.
Inevitable references to Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) could easily feel forced in a film set in Vietnam about the Vietnam War, but Lee has his tongue firmly in his cheek for those he evokes, such as the classic ‘Apache in the Sun’ poster used as a backdrop to a nightclub playing Marvin Gaye, which instead comes off as a respectful yet personal pastiche to that searing critique of American military imperialism.
In addition to contextualising the African-American experience, Lee does not let the American military off the hook for the atrocities they committed in Vietnam. In one scene, a Vietnamese character mentions one such atrocity, and archival images that document this context flash onto the screen. Lee is all too aware that such references to history, names and statistics can easily go over the audience’s head and thus seem flippant and trivial, therefore he ensures that this is not possible in this film.
Da 5 Bloods, while distressing in its topical urgency, is not a draining and cynical film. It is filled with humour, wit and affection between the leads. It is ultimately a film about reconciliation: what power we can achieve when we come together and what we lose when we do not.
Da 5 Bloods is available to stream on Netflix from June 12.
