BlacKkKlansman, based on the book by Ron Stallworth - Eight out of 10

BlacKkKlansman, based on the book by Ron Stallworth

Eight out of 10

The remarkable BlacKkKlansman is the winner of the Grand Prize of the Jury at was it perhaps the most important and relevant cinematic gathering in the world – the Oscars, especially after the Award for Most “Popular Film” would become even less telling about the value of a feature –

The Cannes Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Nec Plus Ultra Palme d’Or, together with the crème de la crème.

Ron Stallworth is the hero of the motion picture and he is the author of the book that has inspired the adaptation for the big screen.

The very talented, natural, promising John David Washington, son of the rather more famous Denzel Washington, portrays him.

The hero is a police officer, albeit the members of his African American community call him and his colleagues “pigs”.

In fact, he would hide his profession from the woman he gets attached to, Patrice Dumas aka Laura Harrier, seeing as she is a militant and very hostile to the police, who used to have – still does albeit on a different scale – discriminating, violent, racist attitudes towards minorities.

To begin with, the debutant protagonist is assigned to menial police work, finding files in the back office and getting bored and frustrated with the repeating, unchallenging tasks, confirming the findings of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a genius and brilliant co-founder of Positive Psychology, explained in his classic Flow.

Flow studies and describes the fact that we get “in the zone” when challenged, not on a couch in front of the television, and our skills match the operations we need to perform and this is when time flies - http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/10/flow-by-mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-this-is.html

The new recruit wants to have assignments that would be provocative, would test his stamina, resilience, bravery, intelligence, grittiness and therefore wants to work undercover.

On his first task, he has to infiltrate his own community of African American young men and women who gather together to find ways to combat the oppression, discrimination, violence of the white man and the “pigs” that abuse, arrest, beat, insult and harass black people.

This where he meets, at such a civic, human rights gathering, Patrice Dumas, a brave, beautiful, modern, vibrant, intelligent, self-aware, resilient, determined, socially responsible, engaged, revolutionary young woman.

The police detective cannot reveal his identify for two major reasons – one because his duty is to stay undercover and find if there is violent action in the planning and the second motive is evident when all the young men and women call the officers of the law is…”pigs”.

The hero tries to make his new friend change the insult and especially the perspective that generates it, but the result is that Patrice is suspicious, asking him if he is a pig, later in the film he would divulge this and other secrets to the precious girl.

Ron Stallworth has the initiative to call David Duke, the Grand wizard of the Klan, pretending to be a white supremacist, fan of the KKK and willing to join the organization and adhere to the local chapter.

After this daring, bold move, the protagonist asks the superiors to allow him to infiltrate an organization that worships white people, advocates racism and other offensive, despicable, abhorrent practices and principles.

He gets approval after initial skepticism and the declared shock at such a preposterous idea, but it works through a surrogate, Flip Zimmerman aka Adam Driver, a Jewish officer who would “represent „the first and probably the only member of the Ku Klux Klan to register with the terrorist outfit.

There are many tense, dangerous moments, for the local members of the Klan are stupid, evidently, but they are also suspicious and one of them in particular is keen to have lie detector tests and the ultimate proof that the novice is not Jewish, the verification of the circumcision, if there is one.

Eventually, Ron Stallworth arrives at the last moment, creating a diversion and allowing Flip to escape a potential exposure, with tragic results- the lunatics prepare a bombing and when their initial target of a large gathering of African Americans is too risqué, they decide to change the venue.

The film is acclaimed as one of the best of the past year, involving other members of prestigious families of actors- John Turturo and Steve Buscemi have sons, presumably, involved in this motion picture and Harry Belafonte is present with tales of horror of [past lynchings that make your hair stand.

Finally, the vicious Trump is part of the film, with real footage of his comments after the clashes in Charlottesville, in 2017, when a young woman died and the awful president praised “good people on both sides” – including the group of white supremacists chanting insults to Jews and other minorities.