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\n Illustration: Warner Bros. Pictures\n <\/p>\n
There\u2019s only one concrete fact about time in One Battle After Another<\/a> \u2014 at some point, 16 years pass between the film\u2019s propulsive first act and the rest. \u201cNot much has changed,\u201d the activist Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) tells us in voice-over after that time jump, but the world that her ex-partner Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) and their daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti)<\/a>, occupy feels just different enough. There\u2019s \u201cMo Bamba<\/a>.\u201d There are nonbinary pronouns. It could be 2018 or 2025 or 2040 when the majority of the film takes place \u2014 it\u2019s hard to say.<\/p>\n Since its release, viewers have been arguing about the chronology of One Battle After Another. Although the revolutionary antics of the French 75 resemble the counterinsurgency movements of the 1960s, the first act of the film \u2014 in which Perfidia meets Bob, falls in love, gets arrested, then breaks free and gives birth to Willa before disappearing entirely \u2014 is definitely not set so far back. There are smartphones, for one, visible upon Perfidia\u2019s arrest. Vineland, the Thomas Pynchon novel Anderson is loosely riffing on, hinges on the relationship between \u201960s revolutionaries and \u201980s yuppies, but One Battle isn\u2019t set in the 1980s, either.<\/p>\n The film\u2019s opening sequence shows the French 75 freeing dozens of migrants who have been detained at the border. That\u2019s a relatively recent practice \u2014 emphasis on relatively. There are migrants detained at the border as I type<\/a>, but they were also being detained in 2014 during Obama\u2019s second administration<\/a>. If this first act is set back then, that would place Bob\u2019s time with Willa in Baktan Cross in 2030. But maybe Bob and Perfidia met later \u2014 during the Biden administration or anytime up to September 2025, the month of the film\u2019s release, which would place the bulk of One Battle After Another in 2041. This seems to be the common belief<\/a> among viewers<\/a>, who have keyed into production details like the sci-fi-ish retrofuturist tech<\/a> that Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn) uses to test Willa\u2019s DNA. But the second you think you\u2019ve maybe anchored yourself in time and place, One Battle After Another again throws a wrench with its fully retro car selection<\/a>. Bob spends a chunk of the movie driving a 1991 Nissan Sentra, and he and other ex-revolutionaries eschew modern smart phones because they can be tracked. All these details lend color to the characters \u2014 Willa\u2019s friend having a Yaris, a discontinued Toyota model, is a fun shout for those of us who had high-school friends with Yarises \u2014 but not so much to the actual, literal universe of One Battle After Another. Anderson is a character-driven director and seems to have chosen these details for them, not for the movie\u2019s coherency.<\/p>\n