I've only now just realised Luc Besson is really fucking overrated. He's had some hits and misses, and I loved Leon and defended it to a lot of people without realising it was based on his real life relationship with an underage girl. Ah, the French. So liberal with their movie rating systems and love of the young.
So now I don't think I can defend it much. The Fifth Element is a great film, but I don't think it's amazing. It's a lot of fun to watch. But after posting my essay which included references to his movie about Joan of Arc, The Messenger, I saw his name in my references and went, oh I didn't remember he directed it.
It's not as good as I remember. I can see he wants to paint a picture of a dubious schizophrenic by using a lot of fever dream imagery. And I like some of the philosophical aspects he raises around death and how it's romanticisied. I think he had a lot of good ideas that culminated in a very long, not very well paced narrative. Some of it was for shock value, but the acting wasn't really good. John Malcovich and Faye Dunaway are probably the best in this, and the hot detective from Dexter kind of played a pseudo love interest for Joan, who was very wooden then very dramatic but I actually enjoyed his performance. Mila Jovovich is... a problem.
She's a problem because she was actually quite amazing in Fifth Element while they could play on her English being bad so they make her like the baby woman, enfant, ingenue - an archetype which has now been heavily critiqued as possibly exploitative - so if we look at the director's history, yeah it gets a bit on the nose. But she is a fun character who grows up and learns as quickly as she can, and isn't always necessarily in danger but probably ends up rescued a touch too often. But I'm not here to trash The Fifth Element.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets has been met with an underwhelming response. It looks gorgeous and the story sounds interesting, but it's all style over substance apparently. I was interested in it when I saw he was directing, I mean, he's the right guy really, it's a French comic series. But he wanted another Fifth Element. I think he does a lot of his own writing, and his scripts aren't brilliant. They have moments of brilliance then tend to fall down. Which is why the conceit of Lucy bothered me so much, given we've moved on from the 10% brain theory ages ago. He could've capitalised on it back when it was plausible, but I think he personally stumbled on it recently and went, that's a cool premise, and then crammed in a heap of evolutionary theory. So what to we get? According to Dan Harmon, it's a film with no stakes. Once she's jacked up on the blue shit, she's unstoppable. It does look very pretty. Hot garbage basically. But I have no interest in seeing it because the concept frustrated me from day one. (In fact I even questioned whether it was still a thing and thought maybe it wasn't debunked. It was.)
I think it's about time we stop separating directors from their work for art's sake. Much like Woody Allen and Roman Polanski, the former apparently never reading any articles or criticism of his films or his relationship with his adopted daughter, and some of the Hollywood alum refuse to stop giving him a pass because he makes all these amazing movies. But that's difficult when he, Polanski and Besson persistently allude to these type of older man, particularly young girl relationships, and end up fetishising them rather than condemning them. I'm not a fan of Allen, I didn't like Rosemary's Baby, which turns out to be the only Polanski movie I've seen. I don't enjoy 60s to 70s horror, I hated the Omen. I did sort of like Psycho but I'm just not interested in Hitchcock.
I have my favourite directors: Hal Hartley, Lynch on a good day (he can be a bit indefensible especially after the new Twin Peaks), Todd Solodnoz; mostly ultra indie types who went a little maverick but still received a lot of praise. I keep forgetting the Henry Fool trilogy will soon be mine, I think I'll spent a post dedicated to my love of this trilogy.
But I don't think I'm going to hold Besson up as being an amazing director because he did one thing I happened to love and another thing I think was more brilliant than it probably was.
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