Unmitigated Gaul
A 10-year-old once attempted
to explain to me the plot of a convoluted kiddie sword-and-sorcery epic. I
didn't have a clue as to what he was talking about, but was charmed by his
fervor. The scrambled space opera The Fifth Element has all the fervor
but none of the charm; it would probably improve in a 10-year-old's retelling.
"When the three planets are in eclipse, the black hole opens and Evil comes,"
intones an archaeologist in the opening scene, set in Egypt in the early
20 th century. He reads aloud from the wall of a cave: "Water, fire,
earth, air, gathering around ... a fifth element ... a weapon against Evil."
Suddenly, an enormous black shadow passes over the desert, and large rubber
tortoises with small bird heads emerge from a spaceship shaped like a large
rubber tortoise foot and kill the archaeologist. Then it appears that the large
rubber tortoises are good guys, and perhaps didn't mean to kill him. One of
them gets shot by an actor from Beverly Hills 90210 and is shut in a
cave, an event of great, if puzzling, significance. Three hundred years later,
a big black ball spitting fire heads for Earth. Dispatched to do a thermal
analysis, a general reports, "The thermal analyzers have jammed." A priest (Ian
Holm) who happens to be in the room announces that the ball is the Evil
referred to in the cave 300 years earlier. "It is Eeevil," he confirms.
"Absolute Eeevil." Another ship full of large rubber tortoises is shot down by
a ship full of large rubber hippos. Fortunately, someone has the sense to clone
Milla Jovovich, who scampers off in a loincloth to save mankind.
It seems that the French are
behind all this. In fact, The Fifth Element , at a reported cost of 90
million (dollars, not francs), is the most expensive French-financed film in
history. As directed and conceived by Luc Besson ( La Femme Nikita ), it
may or may not be the worst movie ever made, but it is one of the most
unhinged. Much of its running time revolves around Retrieving the Stones. I had
no idea what the Stones were, but it eventually turned out that they represent
the Four Elements, and that the rubber tortoises, before being shot down, had
left them in the care of a blue-skinned opera diva with long hoses (bellows?)
dangling from her head.
So
Jovovich, who is the Fifth Element, and who, in combination with the Stones,
has the power to save mankind, teams up with her Galahad, a fair-haired Bruce
Willis, to Retrieve them. The two fight off bad guys to get seats aboard a
space shuttle bound for the diva's concert, which is being held on Phloston
Paradise, a sort of interstellar Oahu. A good half hour is spent getting the
couple past the flight attendants. It's as if Luke Skywalker had to wait around
for his billet to be stamped before he could fly off to destroy the
Death Star. An American director would never have devoted so much time to what
is, after all, a matter of public transportation.
Say this for Besson: He has never been hobbled by bourgeois
notions of logic, coherence, or consistency. The Fifth Element
alternates between high solemnity and low buffoonery, without for a second
finding the ideal middle ground. One moment, creatures are blowing one another
away in gun battles that have all the suspense and emotional weight of
custard-pie fights, while a queenie talk-show host (Chris Tucker) shrieks and
capers for the groundlings. The next, our heroine is viewing a series of
genuine 20 th century wartime-atrocity photos, and weeping with doubt
over whether this vicious world is really worth preserving. At such times, that
big black space ball begins to look like a metaphor for the movie--a giant
Gallic turd.
The other
thing to say for Besson is that here, as in Nikita , he has a
communicable fetish for short-haired, feral girls in scanty outfits. I imagine
that he was powerfully moved by Daryl Hannah's punky, kick-boxing android in
Blade Runner as well as her lissome, childlike mermaid in Splash ;
he has created a role for the Ukrainian-born model Jovovich, who has an
urchin's face atop a willowy body, that's a strange fusion of both. As a
Supreme Being, one of the most powerful forces in the universe, she spends much
of the film being slung around, semiconscious, by her male co-star, on whom the
awesome responsibility falls to convince her that humans are capable of giving
love. Willis redeems the species but not the movie. Still, if the French
persist in wanting to make this kind of American-style blockbuster, they should
study his performance, which is neither serious nor facetious but
something--intangibly American--in between.
As it happens, the French film industry is the
target of an overpraised yet amusing satire called Irma Vep , which has
been enjoying a successful run at New York's Film Forum and will shortly open
in major cities around the country. In it, an aging, exhausted New Wave
director, played by one-time Truffaut alter ego Jean-Pierre Léaud, decides to
remake Louis Feuillade's static 1915-16 French melodrama, Les Vampires ,
with the Hong Kong starlet (and sometime Jackie Chan co-star) Maggie Cheung as
the black-latex-clad leader of a gang of jewel thieves. That he has no reason
to remake the film--apart from a very French fixation on hommage , a need
to work, and a fancy for beautiful Asian girls in black latex--becomes apparent
to him a bit later than it does to his savvy cast and crew.
Irma Vep has been
dubbed the anti- Day for Night , a cynical answer to Truffaut's
romanticization of moviemaking for its own sweet sake. Yes, the shoot collapses
into chaos and despondency. But Irma Vep 's director, Olivier Assayas,
evinces a love of the process that's nearly as palpable as Truffaut's. His
hand-held camera zigs and zags among the actors and technicians, embracing the
hubbub in the post-Altman manner of HBO's brilliant The Larry Sanders
Show . He relishes the communal aspect of filmmaking: the near-familial
bickering, the post-shoot potluck suppers. On two occasions, the picture takes
off into cinematic flights that leave The Fifth Element (which cost
about 50 times as much) sputtering on the launch pad. In the first sequence,
Cheung re-creates her character's nocturnal prowl in her own hotel, the camera
coiling around her like a boa and hovering breathlessly over her shoulder as
she snatches a necklace from another guest's room, then regards it on the
rooftop in a cool neon-lit drizzle. The second is a black-and-white montage
that's as mind-blowing, in context, as the '60s shorts by Michael Snow and Stan
Brakhage that it so cheerfully apes.
Cheung,
who speaks English with a surprising British accent, at once grounds the film
and gives it a touch of mystery--the mystery of simplicity. The movie uses her
open Asian face to make the French faces seem neurotic and devious: Hers is
like a clear pool next to their rather pinched visages. The ingenue, the
straight man, she is lithe and funny in her own right. She listens politely to
Léaud's nearly incomprehensible English musings on Feuillade, then goes ahead
and does her job with a minimum of fuss. You wouldn't spend hours discussing
your motivation with Jackie Chan.
Irma Vep was written and shot on the fly, conceived as a
piece of a three-part anthology and perhaps overextended. It's thin. It gains
much, however, from a subplot featuring Nathalie Richard as Zoe, a high-strung
lesbian costume designer who's too shy to put the moves on Maggie. (That
Richard bears an uncanny resemblance to Anne Heche adds to the frisson .)
Zoe doubles as a spokeswoman for the director's aesthetics: American films, she
complains, "have too much decoration, too much money"; French films are
increasingly impersonal and apolitical. It's not hard to imagine what Zoe would
make of The Fifth Element .
In fact, watching Irma
Vep , my thoughts kept drifting to Luc Besson's shambolic, would-be epic,
which represents the real dead end of French cinema. Imagine an Irma
Vep -like documentary of The Fifth Element 's filming, on vast sets,
with hordes of technicians attending to hordes of gun-toting rubber hippos.
Imagine Luc Besson sitting, like Jean-Pierre Léaud, amid the chaos, a hand on
his forehead, mumbling, "Zere ees no flesh ... no blood ... I feel nossing
..."
A Supreme Being in the
big city: Leeloo (Jovovich) goes out on a ledge (40 seconds) :
Zorg (Gary Oldman) demos
firepower (45 seconds) :
