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Contains racist referencesAccording to Kevin Willmott's satirical fake documentary C.S.A. America would be a different place had the Southern States won the Civil War. But not that different, a point the writer/director hammers home repeatedly over the course of this entertaining, if only moderately persuasive, feature. Purporting to be an exposΓ© from the 'British Broadcasting Service', the film records the institutionalised racism of this make-believe superpower, pausing intermittently to advertise such hilariously un-PC products as Sambo lubricator and Jigaboo toothpaste.
In Willmott's alternative history, Abraham Lincoln was not the great liberator but a snivelling coward whose flight to Canada - in blackface no less - was recreated in a DW Griffiths silent entitled The Hunt For Dishonest Abe. ("I ain't no prez'dent!" he whimpers as he is apprehended. "I'z a darky!") Forging alliances with Hitler's Germany and South Africa, this version of America annexes Mexico, attacks Japan first and sets up a 'Cotton Curtain' to stop slaves sneaking across the border. The 'Not One Drop' policy, meanwhile, maintains a strict division between white "massas" and their subservient "chattel".
"HEAVY-HANDEDNESS DOMINATES"
Producer Spike Lee tackled similar territory in his 2000 satire Bamboozled, and the same heavy-handedness dominates here - at the expense, one suspects, of a more reasoned and thoughtful debate on slavery's bitter legacy. Where the film does score a bullseye is in a postscript detailing how much of its comic detail derives from actual fact - a chilling reminder of how far the US still has to go if it is ever to make amends for its brutal past.
