In 1967, when the Vietnam War inflamed the political landscape, the city of Detroit was ravaged by an insurrection of black neighborhoods: in this chaos, a handful of young blacks, members of a doo-wop group, took refuge in a room at the Algiers Motel. But the police are going to attack these musicians and, in the early morning, there are three dead… Kathryn Bigelow signs her masterpiece there: there passes, in these images, such rage, such determination, that the film turns into a firebrand. Inspired by the real events of July 23, 1967 (from a screenplay by Mark Boal, who is collaborating for the third time with Bigelow), the author of “Démineurs” and “Zero Dark Thirty” touches on the essential: these hateful policemen, aren’t those grimacing cop faces animated by an elementary racism that hasn’t changed? Where does this absolute rejection of the Other come from?
A drama with terrible echoes
The director juggles with formats, period documents, reconstructions, in brief scenes. At first, Molotov cocktails and cobblestones; in the end, the tanks and the army. Outside, the fire; inside, terror. Because it is the cops who torture, rape and kill. A black vigilante, Melvin Dismukes (played by John Boyega) witnesses the barbarism: powerless, he tries in vain to bring the assassins to reason. What is striking is the extraordinary mastery of the production. Between the suffocating closed doors of the interrogations in the motel and the outbreaks of violence in the street, the film takes on an extraordinary scale, from which no spectator emerges unscathed.
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Complex film, superb moral saga: nothing is free, nothing allows you to take refuge in a comfort zone. We are thrown, with force, into a drama with terrible echoes. As in “Battleship Potemkin” or “Z” (the comparison is essential at this level), the spectator is forced to watch the injustice, the savagery, the decomposition of a society. For the first time, Kathryn Bigelow tackles the political resonances of these riots head-on: needless to say, they are more topical than ever in the United States. A very great film, necessary. Better: essential.
Thursday August 4 at 8:50 p.m. on Ciné + Emotion. American drama by Kathryn Bigelow (2017). With Anthony Mackie, John Boyega, Jacob Latimore. 2h23. (Multicast and On Demand).
