Born in Flames

Last year in the run-up to the presidential election, TCM did a spotlight on "political" films, with at least one title that I had never heard of: Born in Flames. Once again, this was a movie where the short synopsis sounded interesting, so I eventually got around to watching it to be able to do a review here.

Born in Flames was made in the early 1980s, and set around the 10th anniversy of a putative socialist revolution in the US. However, as socialist revolutions tend to do, a lot was promised and little given, to the point that that's a lot of discontent from people who want good jobs. Some of this discontent comes from women who think the revolution hasn't gone far enough, because in their eyes women are still getting a raw deal.

These women have gone about getting a better deal in different ways. Some have taken to generally peaceful, albeit illegal means like pirate radio, with the existence of black station Radio Phoenix and white station Radio Ragazza. There's more militant means too, with an older black radical acadmeic nominally advising a Women's Army which the authorities aren't certain is lead by either a particular white radical feminist or the black activist Adelaide Norris. They are more of a guerilla operation doing things like trying to stop rapists rather than anything that would be considered military or even overly violent against normal people.

At least, not yet. They're certainly planning (nowadays, people would probably use the term "larping"), getting firearms training and doing target practice somewhere outside New York. Things go too far, however, when Adelaide gets in contact with a woman from Polisario. (A quick explainer: after Spain left Spanish Sahara, Morocco claimed the territory. Polisario started agitating for independence, largely funded by Algeria who set up refugee camps where Polisario gained more or less dictatorial control.) Adelaide comes back from an international flight at which point she's taken into custody by US police eventually to be found dead in her holding cell. The authorities say suicide, while the Women's Army believes Adelaide was murdered. At this point they start taking much more direct action.

Born in Flames is an extremely low-budget movie, and that's the cause of both the film's greatest strengths and its biggest weaknesses. The raw footage of a New York which was still trying to recover from a lost decade or, as I like to refer to it, the era when Gerald Ford told the city to drop dead, is something that really works. Also working is the way newscasts are used to show how the authorities are completely out of touch with the people in the real world. (The movie obviously doesn't think that if the Women's Army were successful, they would still be out of touch with the great mass of the population.) Working less well is the screenplay, which doesn't really posit any way the US would have come up with this socialist revolution.

A lot of reviers talk about the politics of the movie and that whether you agree with them is largely what's going to dictate if you like the movie or not. I'm not quite so sure. I am certainly not on the side of "socialist revolution hasn't gone far enough", and I'm certainly not a lesbian, or even a woman. Yet I found Born in Flames a movie that had some intriguing ideas even as I felt it has more misses than hits. So definitely watch for yourself while drawing your own conclusions.