Da 5 Blood, Spike Lee lost in the jungle on Netflix

Spike Lee should have been the first Black to chair the Cannes jury this year. The Covid-19 decided otherwise. The Festival did not take place and the New York filmmaker promised that he would make himself available in 2021 to honor the invitation. His new film, Da 5 Bloods, a Netflix production, would have allowed the streaming platform to make its return to the Croisette (out of competition since it is still prohibited).

He won't wait. It leaves today without the sounding board of the biggest cinema festival in the world. But another event gave it a powerful echo: the death of George Floyd, an African-American murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis on May 25.

The promotion of his new film has turned into a platform. Between a "brother" and two "peace & love" , Spike Lee guns to Donald Trump, whom he calls "the orange agent" without going much further than the insult. His films are (sometimes) more interesting than his speech. Lee never stopped staging racial tensions in his country ( Do The Right Thing , Jungle Fever , Malcolm X ...) and telling the story of the United States through the African-American prism.

Between Chuck Norris and Godard

Da 5 Bloods allows him to talk about the Vietnam War and to recall that blacks, second-class citizens in their country, served as cannon fodder (30% soldiers for a black population of 10% in the United States) .

Except that Lee is very bad at filming the combat sequences. We have known this since Miracle in Santa Anna , which unconvincingly staged a black battalion during the Second World War in Italy. He also knows it and here pays tribute to Coppola to mean that no one will ever do better than Apocalypse Now .

Lee gets around the obstacle by showing four black veterans returning to Vietnam today. They hope to repatriate the remains of a comrade and especially to recover gold bars. Begins a mollassonne and chatty adventure in the jungle, where the four friends make "checks" or get confused against the background of Marvin Gaye. The most interesting is Paul, returned broken from the war and become a voter of Trump.

By the way, the director settles scores with France, recalling the defeat in Indochina and entrusting Jean Reno a role of ridiculous villain and Mélanie Thierry a role of nice ridiculous. Finally, Lee inserts extracts and photos of African-American icons, from Mohammed Ali to Martin Luther King, finishing making Da 5 Bloods a mix of confusing genres, between series B à la Chuck Norris and film leaflet à la Godard .

Back in the saddle two years ago with BlacKkKlansman, which won him the Grand Prix at Cannes, his first "real" Oscar (best screenplay) after having received one of honor, and an indoor success, we do not know how to locate this "Spike Lee Joint" (official designation and untranslatable of its productions) which has all the faults of most Netflix films signed by reputable authors, rich in dollars but poor in inspiration (of course, there are exceptions). A major relapse or parenthesis failed without consequence. Only the future will tell.