New York (AFP)

The American director Spike Lee is back with "Da 5 Bloods", a feature film produced by Netflix and available on the platform on Friday, in which he pursues his quest for representation of blacks through political cinema.

While the movement born from the death of George Floyd grows a little more every day, the director offers a film certainly linked to the Vietnam War but whose subject appears perfectly in his time.

Four black American veterans return to Vietnam to recover the remains of their patrol leader, killed in action in the jungle, as well as a shipment of gold hidden on the advice of their ex-comrade in arms.

The expedition does not go as planned and what started out as an introspective feature film with the scent of nostalgia turns into an action film with a big show.

The cast is brilliant, with Chadewick Boseman ("Black Panther") in the role of the charismatic leader who appears regularly with the help of flashbacks, and a skewer of impeccably correct mature supporting roles.

But Spike Lee is not satisfied with an action film staging Americans in Vietnam, even if he multiplies the references to his predecessors, in the first place "Apocalypse Now".

He plays on several tables, multiplying the themes at the risk of abandoning some on the way, and this eventful excursion in what was Indochina is only a pretext to evoke the place of blacks in the history of the United United.

African-Americans, Spike Lee recalls throughout the film, have been a fundamental cog in each major stage of the American epic, each time paying with their blood.

From the construction of the country to the series of wars in which the United States has engaged, Blacks have always paid a heavy price in building a Nation.

"We are going to the puzzle for this country from the start, hoping that they will give us the place we deserve," said his companions Norman, the patrol leader, before his death. "All we got was a kick in the ass."

- The past to illuminate the present -

This gold, which the four former soldiers want to recover, is an obvious symbol of the repairs that a part of the black community is demanding, and beyond, for slavery, segregation and then the discrimination suffered by Afro- Americans over 400 years old.

As he did with his previous film "BlacKkKlansman", which earned him his first Oscar and the Grand Prix at Cannes, the 63-year-old director links the latest news, including Donald Trump but also the Black Lives Matter movement.

"What I see on the streets today is what I remember during the 60s when I was growing up," the Brooklyn boy said in an interview with CBS on Tuesday. the major demonstrations which marked the end of the "Sixties", in particular against the Vietnam War and for civil rights.

A sign of his taste for complexity, he made his richest character, in "Da 5 Bloods" (played by actor Delroy Lindo), a black sympathizer of Donald Trump, who proudly wears a "Make America Great" cap. Again ".

"It makes you understand why he wears this cap," said the man who was to preside over the Cannes film festival this year. "You have sympathy for him."

More than 30 years after "Do The Right Thing", whose epilogue strangely echoes the death of George Floyd, Spike Lee continues to embody better than anyone a black cinema that wants to be both militant and mainstream.

© 2020 AFP