The end of the beginning after the last day of the trauma

Rating: 10/10 (2 February 2013)

This is an admirable adventure film and it probably reflect a deep change in American culture concerning the Blacks, African Americans. So far the great authors and playwrights dealing with the Blacks only or practically only showed the villainous hardships of slavery. This film surely shows a lot of that, but with a different eye than in Toni Morrison's Beloved or many other novels. It shows slavery as the most cruel and absurd social system ever invented but once again from a new point of view, that of a black man who gets out of slavery by accident and gets in business with a German immigrant and shares with him the profession of bounty hunter. That means he can ride a horse and kill white people, provided it is under the authority of his white associate and under the sanctimonious authority of a court-ordered mission, that of catching some fugitive criminals dead or alive.
This black man has a vengeance to fulfill since his wife has been sold away to another planter, one of the worst in Mississippi. I will not deflower the film and tell you the details. This black man, Django, wants to find his wife and free her and in the end, of course, he will succeed, but what an adventure.
The new element in this film is that beyond slavery, and we are just before the Civil War, some Blacks are recapturing their desire to be free beyond their fate of obedience. That fate is explained by the planter as being the result of some kind of a "malformation" of the skull. It is of course the result of nothing but the Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSS) they have been through in the daily suffering imposed onto them mostly for the pure and simple pleasure of the white planters and their white associates who are all shown over and over again as nothing but sadist dullards.
We are here in a postcolonial approach that is only possible because the Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, also called Post Traumatic Slavery Syndrome is finding some kind of a solution, some healing procedure, some way of stepping over it and moving on. This has been a slow and long procedure and the Civil Rights movement, Martin Luther King, and now Barack Obama, and many others before and in-between, have been instrumental in that evolution. Blacks or African Americans are finally finding their self-respect, their self-freedom, their self-pride back and they can finally decolonialize their own souls, their own minds, as the CNN wrote so rightly on November 22, 2012. And when one's mind is free of any colonial heritage the sky is the limit and the White House is the first step to that sky.
Of course the film is unrealistic, the weapons are as effective as missile throwers if not even rockets launched by some drone from the sky. Of course there is too much blood. But it is the first time some of the cruelty of these slave-owners is finally shown, alluded to and defused into absolute punishment. To be free in your soul you must be convinced your torturers have been punished, even those who were silent if not consenting witnesses. That means you have to finally remember and reconcile with and recommit yourself to the future and no longer remain enslaved to the past. That means forgiving the descendants of your torturers and that means the descendants of your torturers have to finally step over their belief you are inferior, which makes them superior without having to prove it.
That's why this film is great. It is really the beginning of the end, maybe even the beginning of the day after the end.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU