Over the course of a hurried two hours and forty minutes, One Battle After Another, from writer-director-producer Paul Thomas Anderson, interrogates ideas of infatuation and how, in the long-term, these fizzier or even irrational feelings pale in comparison to the enduring, undefeatable love experienced by a parent who demands to be present in their child's life. We experience both of these clashing wavelengths through Pat Calhoun, a washed-up anti-fascist activist played by Leonardo DiCaprio who, latterly, goes by the name of Bob Ferguson. In his younger years Pat was the explosives guy for an insurrectionist movement who tasked themselves with liberating shivering families from the ICE detention centres dotted around California. Although clearly willing to place himself in incredibly dangerous situations as a way of expressing his personal ideals, Pat's stake in the French 75 revolutionary group does seem to hinge on the participation of Teyana Taylor's Perfidia, a short-lived but beguiling presence in One Battle whose influence extends far beyond her screentime.
Compared to the rest of her French 75 allies, who all dabble with concealment and disguise, Perfidia is brasher, preferring to operate openly and even outlandishly. While teammates pick at masks, covering their mouths and lower faces, Perfidia delights in revealing herself, demanding to be noted, even admired. She's a whirlwind, whipping up everything she touches and behaving like the centrepiece in a Hype Williams music video. We are shown that her violent, unapologetic approach to activism is intertwined with her sexuality; she practically begs Bob to fuck her when a bomb they have just planted is seconds away from detonating. While Bob is keen to organise their pairing into the stability of a relationship, and everything that comes with that, Perfidia is playing away. Finding herself locked into a dom-sub dynamic with a prissy jack-booter, played by Sean Penn, who she previously attempted to victimise while on an assignment. Turns out that Penn's Colonel Lockjaw gets off on being dominated, specifically, by a black woman and Perfidia is at least somewhat agreeable to serving that kink if it keeps her out of jail, using violent abashment to physically put this authoritarian in his place.
With a child now in the picture - whose onscreen conception can either be attributed to Bob and Perfidia tearing at each other's clothes in a getaway car while a pylon implodes or Perfidia inserting a firearm into Lockjaw's rectum - this new mother retreats from domesticity, sinking into a particularly destructive kind of postpartum depression. While Perfidia pursues an agenda based on a ruthless self-interest, betraying her comrades in the process, Bob flees across the country with their child, settling into paranoid rhythms embellished by substance abuse. Their daughter though flourishes under the tutelage of Benicio del Toro's hilariously calm karate master-cum-community leader, sensei Sergio. Lockjaw, seemingly issued with a blank cheque to rough up and intimidate high-schoolers in a particularly sunken America, is (eventually) hot on their trail, filled with tearful aspirations to impress a ghoulish cabal of white supremacists. To his credit DiCaprio, one of the few remaining film stars able to get non-franchise projects bankrolled based purely on his interest (a trick the actor looks set to repeat in the near future with Michael Mann's Heat sequel), is happy throughout One Battle to take a backseat to his many co-stars.
Although it's Bob at the forefront of the film's absurdist ad campaign, his character is more of a subordinate presence to both Perfidia and later their daughter, Chase Infiniti's Willa. Bob, armed with a dressing gown and a pair of absolutely gigantic sunglasses, must fight through the depressive fog he has generated in the decade and a half since the mother of his child absconded. Quite unable to focus, Bob is buoyed by sympathetic parties, like Sergio, who guide him step-by-step through these events. Although clearly past his prime, Bob's former life does still inspire respect, with Willa's big cat fixated sensei even referring to him, in conversation with the skate crew about to guide him across burning roofs, as a 'Gringo Zapata'. Throughout the film's many, intersecting predator-and-prey chases then - Anderson thoroughly delivering on the promise of that infamous anecdote about him dropping out of NYU because his screenwriting lecturer denigrated anyone who would aspire to repeat Terminator 2: Judgment Day - Bob is stuck trailing far behind his targets. The beleaguered father never quite arriving on-time to rescue his loved ones, often only able to offer a fleeting distraction or sobbing commiseration. What's important though is that, like Wile E Coyote before him, Bob really does work his hardest to keep up with those who repeatedly exceed his grasp.
