I’ve read about the controversies surrounding this film, how earnest its apparent antifascist take is for example, before I learned anything about its story. Now after watching it, I still can’t make up my mind and I wonder if it doesn’t matter at all. This is a frustrating film on so many levels as it builds viewer expectations towards a certain direction but then refuses to give us the catharsis we need. Still we can’t pull our eyes away from it though due to its spectacular action scenes and sheer bizarreness. I wouldn’t agree that it’s the best film of the year but it’s auteur film, that’s for sure.

A fast-paced prologue introduces Perfidia Beverly Hills and Pat Calhoun, lovers who are both members of the French 75 revolutionary group. While breaking detained migrants from a camp, Perfidia sexually humiliates the commanding officer Steven Lockjaw, which turns him on. Later he corners her during another operation but lets her go on the understanding that she will meet him later for sex which she does. After she delivers a girl named Charlene, Pat wants them to settle down but she refuses. She kills a security guard while robbing a bank, is caught once again by Lockjaw and turns in her fellow revolutionaries for clemency. Pat assumes a new identity and raises Charlene by himself in a sanctuary city. Lockjaw is promoted in the wake of his successes and becomes a senior figure in the establishment. Sixteen years later, Lockjaw applies to be a member of the Christmas Adventurers Club, an elite white supremacist secret society. In order to hide evidence of his interracial relationship with Perfidia, he seeks to definitively identify her parentage and kill her if necessary.

The entire introductory sequence is a whirlwind tour of larger-than-life characters and wild escapades set in bizarre version of the U.S. It beggars belief that any organized revolutionary group could get away with operations on this scale even if they refrain from actually killing anyone. Nor is it clear what they even hope to achieve. Perfidia and Lockjaw seem like characters from an earlier age, which makes sense since they belong to the height of the hippie era in the 1960s, per the novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon which is cited as the film’s inspiration. It doesn’t make much sense but it is so fun and exciting. But then the prologue ends, the real story unrolls at a more sedate pace and it turns out to actually be about the father-daughter relationship between Pat and Charlene, with Lockjaw as the antagonist, and I’m like, what? What follows after is still a great action-adventure flick but it’s a drastically ramped-down version of what went on before. Pat, now renamed Bob, is now an old, washed-up stoner who can only dream of past glories. Charlene, now known as Willa, is a mostly ordinary young girl who mistakenly idealizes her mother and despises her father for being a paranoid addict.

There’s still all kinds of madness: the smartly-suited white supremacists with a secret underground lair and an assassin on call, the revolutionary network’s extensive system of recognition signals, Willa’s karate sensei Sergio who turns out to be in charge of his own underground railway sheltering immigrants. It’s absurdly unrealistic. Encrypted communications over the Internet would be so much more secure than what these revolutionaries are using. But the wackiness of the world is key to the appeal and I gather that’s even been watered down from the novel. Still, I can’t but feel a little cheated because the characters and the events in the prologue are more colorful and exciting. I was also thrown off by how it has the structure of an action movie yet refuses to deliver what we expect. Bob means well but is comically incompetent as a hero. Sergio goes way out of his way to help Bob yet is tangential to the plot, Willa mostly manages to save herself, and most of all there’s no confrontation between Bob and Lockjaw. It puts all of the pieces in play but then refuses to let events unfurl in the usual way.

The result is an amazing and amusing spectacle, and discombobulating is the right word to use here as it keeps whipsawing in all directions. It’s even confusing about its anti-fascist message. Lockjaw and the rest of establishment are cartoon villains sure, but Perfidia seems to be in the fight more for the thrills than out of ideological conviction. Bob might be in it because he has the hots for her, just like Lockjaw. More than anything, the vibes are cynical and nihilistic. They keep fighting the good fight but nothing ever changes. One Battle After Another indeed.