Anna

Anna [Luc Besson, 2019]:

Writer and director Luc Besson probably intended for the film's peculiar structure to draw comparisons to a matryoshka doll (the doll being the symbol with which his title character, Anna, a Russian criminal, turned spy, turned super model, is apparently linked.) So what we have is a series of nested flashbacks being presented as if they're different, hidden layers; each one intended to strip away the façade of Anna's differing personas to take us closer to the character's emotional truth.

It's an interesting approach, in theory, and especially for a film that deals with themes of espionage, role playing and appearance as deception. However, in practice, such intelligence is beyond Besson's capabilities, as he delivers a story that is less complex than convoluted. The structure, which cuts back and forth between 1985, 1987, 1989 and 1990 (and often flashing backwards and forwards three months at a time between scenes) is genuinely alienating, exposing the contrivances of Besson's plotting and the transparency of his narrative machinations. It also makes the relationships between his characters vague and unknowable, reducing every major plot point to a nonsensical twist. It's a fatal flaw in a film that already had a lot going against it.

Besson has been without interest for me for over a decade now, and Anna does little to reverse the downward trajectory that his career has taken. It's a joyless, by-the-numbers production that seems self-consciously manufactured to recall the filmmakers former glories, specifically La Femme Nikita (1990) and Léon (aka The Professional) (1994). Worse, it finds Besson pushing an incredibly sexist "female empowerment" narrative, where once again a wayward young woman is picked from the slums, rescued by an older male mentor (who also becomes her insatiable lover), and is then stripped (literally) of her identity and sense of self in order to be rebuilt as an image of the man's ideal.

Anna [Luc Besson, 2019]:

Thirty years ago, this same narrative was enough to see Besson tagged as a feminist filmmaker, but such a reputation now seems entirely ludicrous when we compare this tired scenario against the numerous sexual assault allegations that have since been made against the filmmaker, and how the nature of these allegations seem to mirror this male savior/male mogul ideal that he often endorses through his work. Anna might use her chess smarts to play the KGB and the CIA off against each other, but she does so by bed-hopping between the two factions and letting Besson's camera sneaks shots up her skirt.

As Anna, former model Sasha Luss deserved a better film. She delivers a strong performance, even with such weak material, and throws herself into the film's action sequences with great skill and enthusiasm. Besson was once a master of action cinema, but here he delivers mostly scenes of disorganized carnage or moments of self-parody.

Further reading at Lights in the Dusk: Taxi: Notes on 'the Auteur' [12 September 2020] Luc Besson: An Introduction? [26 September 2019], Possible Worlds: A look at the science-fiction films of Luc Besson [20 October 2019],

Taxi

"Midday. I've gone for croissants and married the baker in despair."

Notes on 'the Auteur'

When people discredit the "auteur" theory, it always seems to be based on an assumption that it implies a director is the only person responsible for the making of a film. This is obviously not true. As we're often told, film is a collaborative medium. And yet, even the most democratic of creative endeavors still has someone leading the project, acting as the funnel through which ideas are channeled, shaping the work from the ground up. Admittedly, having read very little critical theory, my conception of the auteur theory never seemed inherently specific to the role of the director. Yes, many directors are, or at the very least will be seen as "auteur" filmmakers, especially those that also write or conceive their own work. However, this isn't to say that the director is always the auteur.

For me, when we claim a film is the work of an "auteur", we're really saying, in the most plain and mundane terms, that it has an author. That despite the countless number of individual crew members, performers, producers, and financiers that may have contributed to the making of a film, that there was someone at the center of things, shepherding the project through to completion. This "auteur" could be the director, the writer, the producer and even the lead actor.

Think of the films of action stars like Tom Cruise, Jackie Chan, Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme, among others. They may work with directors that have a reputation for being "auteur" filmmakers, but there is nonetheless a consistency to the kind of subject matter these performers return to, an autonomy to how they're filmed and presented, a level of control over how the material is shaped and distributed, all of which go beyond the familiarities of their directors' prior or subsequent works. These actors are the authors of their respective films, their image and, to a large extent, their own legacies.

By contrast, in the modern Hollywood, the author of the work is often the studio and its army of executives. In the films of Disney®, including works by Pixar and Marvel Studios, the role of the writer, producer and director is to facilitate the creative wishes of the studio executives. They're not creating their own personal vision; they're creating a product that the studio has the power to approve or decline. In television, the series creator, or showrunner, is generally the "auteur." For instance, everyone recognizes a Ryan Murphey production when they see one – from Nip/Tuck (2003-2010) and American Horror Story (2011-present) to the more recent Netflix distributed Hollywood (2020), they have a consistent style, politics and casting – regardless of who writes or directs the individual episodes.

A good example of what I'm getting at here can be found in the film in question. Taxi (1998), a knockabout French action movie with aspirations to Hollywood, is directed (and directed well) by the veteran film and commercials director Gérard Pirès. Pirès's work on the film cannot be discredited. While Taxi isn't a great film, it is nonetheless well-acted, the story, thin as it is, remains frequently engaging, and the action sequences, particularly the way the numerous car chases have been filmed and edited, are never less than thrilling. But Pirès's isn't the author of the film, but rather fulfilling the vision of his writer and producer, Luc Besson.

Taxi [Gérard Pirès, 1998]:

From the ground-up, Taxi is characteristic of Besson's own work as director, specifically his earlier films, such as Subway (1985) and La Femme Nikita (1990), and it sets the tone and template for many of the subsequent action movies the author would go on to write and produce, including The Transporter (2002), District 13 (2004) and Taken (2008), as well as those films' later sequels. In each of these works, Besson takes typically French characters, humor and settings, and juxtaposes them with very American themes, genres and storytelling devices, and the same is true for the film in question. Taxi is one-part "cinéma du look", one-part Hollywood buddy movie (à la 48 Hours [1982]), and one-part precursor to the "Fast & Furious" franchise.

Like Subway, the film begins with a burst of action. A vehicle speeding through the daytime streets, piloted by our central character. The camera, almost at ground-level, trails behind the vehicle, with loud music used to set the tone for action and excitement.

Subway [Luc Besson, 1985]:

Taxi [Gérard Pirès, 1998]:

In both films, the opening chase sequence is used to establish character and setting. Subway shows off the familiar Parisian settings recognisable from countless films before and since, while Taxi showcases the less familiar, though more exotic highways and byways of suburban Marseilles. However, these opening sequences, or title sequences even, also provide a more important function in expanding but also subverting the expectations of the viewing audience and our perception of the contemporary French cinema.

For a populist like Besson, the intention with films like Subway and Taxi, as well as later films like the aforementioned District 13, is to recreate the idea of the "French film™." To break apart the loftier or more highbrow expectations that audiences outside of France had come to associate with their national cinema, typified as it was internationally by the classic early exports of Jean Vigo, Jean Renoir and Henri-Georges Clouzot, or the subsequent films of the "New Wave" and works by serious "auteur" filmmakers, like Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda.

International audiences tend to think of French cinema in these terms: small apartments, relationship dramas, black and white cinematography, poetic ruminations, loneliness, existentialism, and joyless sex. In reality, the French cinema has almost always produced mainstream comedies, low-brow farce, action films, cop movies and gory horror; films that generally made huge amounts of money at the domestic box-office but rarely travelled outside of French-speaking territories. Given an international platform through the success of his earlier work, Besson continued onwards in his attempts to create films that were accessible to the broadest of audiences, forging an image of a new French cinema that was young, dumb and full of fun; where fast cars and fast women (usually with guns) engaged in scenes of full-bodied action; and where there were enough moments of eccentricity and childlike whimsy intercut to give the impression that the films were perhaps more individualist than they really were.

In its best moments, Taxi recalls the legacy of the "cinéma du look": the brief and contentious film movement coined by critic Raphaël Bassan in La Revue du Cinéma issue n° 448, May 1989, which lumped together the works of directors Jean-Jacques Beineix, Leos Carax and Besson himself. The characteristics of the "cinéma du look" was an emphasis on youth and subcultures, on alienated characters in a state of rebellion against the modern world, and on the conflict between the lasting legacy of the films of the French new wave and the burgeoning influence of the new Hollywood movies produced during the 1970s and early 1980s. Films like Diva (1981), Subway and Mauvais sang (1986), while markedly different from one another in their attitudes and intentions, were seen to take recognizable Hollywood genres like mystery, film noir and science fiction, and dismantle them, populating them with bored but beautiful characters, self-reflexive allusions to popular culture and a glossy contemporary style.

We see that here in Taxi, specifically in its earlier sequences, which finds in its central character, pizza delivery driver turned taxi driver Daniel Morales, the kind of laid-back, directionless but streetwise dreamer that we might have found in films like Boy Meets Girl (1984) or Betty Blue (37°2 le matin, 1986). That he lives out of a converted garage full of car parts and vehicles in states of repair and works out of a weird brutalist pizza restaurant on the edges of the docks, also helps evoke the further influence of Beineix and Carax, specifically The Moon in the Gutter (1983) and the aforementioned Diva and Mauvais sang.

Taxi [Gérard Pirès, 1998]:

Mauvais sang (Bad Blood) [Leos Carax, 1986]:

The Moon in the Gutter [Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1983]:

However, the moment the titular taxi inexplicably transforms from anonymous cab to tricked-out hotrod, effectively signals the moment both the film, and Besson's career, shift from quirky "cinéma du look" to brainless DTV action. While the film remains well-made and entertaining, it seems to signal a definite change in direction for Besson, who would never really recapture the same adoration and respect that he'd commanded as a filmmaker during the 1980s and early-to-mid 1990s, with later works, both as director and producer, failing with both audiences and critics.

While Taxi attempts and largely succeeds in creating a French film with a Hollywood outlook and a greater emphasis on entertainment and spectacle, it's never quite found the same creative success or cultural legacy as Besson's own action cinema that preceded it, specifically La Femme Nikita and the problematic Léon (aka, The Professional, 1994). Taxi is full of moments of great action, stunts and thrilling chase sequences, but it's also marred by Besson's deficiencies as a screenwriter. Chiefly, the film is shamelessly sexist, with female characters providing no real function to the plot beyond reinforcing the heterosexual masculinity of the central characters, or worse, being mercilessly leered over and harassed by both the protagonists and the camera itself. There's also the usual crass stereotyping and actual racism that frequently turn up in Besson's scripts, as if jokes about all people from South East Asia looking alike will somehow engender sympathy between the central characters.

Taxi [Gérard Pirès, 1998]:

Despite these various shortcomings, the film wasn't without interest. Again, it's perfectly entertaining, often amusing, with great car stunts and thrilling action sequences, and a great affinity for character, and the natural atmosphere of its south of France locations. It also features moments that point towards an even better film that might have been: specifically the earlier sequences, which are more preoccupied with the relationship between characters; the subculture of young people that converge on this strange and deeply cinematic pizza restaurant; and the feeling of vibrant, nocturnal worlds existing on the fringes of society. Ultimately however, the film is of most interest in marking and defining the evolution of Besson's career as it developed from respected cult filmmaker to entertainment entrepreneur, and how it illustrates the role of the "auteur", not as the director, but the person shaping the material from the ground-up.

Further reading at Lights in the Dusk: Luc Besson: An Introduction? [26^th September 2019], Possible Worlds: A look at the science-fiction films of Luc Besson [20^th October 2019], The Film Director as Superstar: Or, The death of the author auteur [15^th August, 2020]

Possible Worlds

At look at the science-fiction films of Luc Besson

To look at the three science-fiction films of the writer and director Luc Besson is to witness the journey of a life in three-acts. Each film is emblematic of a particular stage in the filmmaker's career and helps to chart what might be called a rise and fall narrative: showing the beginning, middle and end of Besson's tenure as a respected (or even respectable) figure in contemporary European cinema. The three films illustrate the best and worst of Besson's work and abilities, and are worth looking at as a parallel to his wider career.

At the age of twenty-three, Luc Besson began production on what would eventually become his first feature-length film, The Last Battle (1983). Unlike his contemporaries, Jean-Jacques Beineix - whose first film, Diva (1981), had brought pop-stylisation and a focus on youth culture to the heart of the French cinema with a story combining self-reflexive elements of film noir, action movie and alienated romanticism - and Leos Carax - who a year later would centre his own cinema on an exploration of twenty-something existentialism in the suburban black and white wanderings of Boy Meets Girl (1984) - Besson wasn't drawn to filmmaking because of any great passion for the medium. Growing up with an interest in comic books and deep sea diving, Besson fell into movies when a diving accident left him unable to continue his chosen profession. He turned to writing and subsequently to odd jobs on film sets, before graduating to the role of director on various TV commercials and music videos.

Perhaps due in part to his back-story and the fact that his aesthetic and thematic preoccupations had yet to be coloured by filmic conventions or mainstream expectations, The Last Battle remains an anomaly in Besson's career: a near wordless, black and white, post-apocalyptic fantasy about two desperate warriors fighting for possession of the last surviving woman. Brief scenes of action and humour, predicative of the path Besson would later take, are certainly evident, but ultimately it's a film more concerned with atmosphere, symbolism and ideas.

For those familiar with Besson's later efforts, such as his recent action movies, the mononymic double-bill of Lucy (2014) and Anna (2019) respectively, The Last Battle might seem like a challenge. Finding its aesthetic identity halfway between an esoteric art-house picture, like Claude Faraldo's similarly wordless satire Themroc (1973), and a low-budget semi-exploitation movie, like George Miller's Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981), it remains a far cry from the slick, unpretentious, mainstream movies that now dominate Besson's oeuvre.

The Last Battle [Luc Besson, 1983]:

While one could take Besson's choice of shooting in black and white as an artistic statement, I think it's something more practical. Besson wants to show a stylised world: a world without colour. Black and white expresses this in the literal sense. While one could look at these images and see something of Tarkovsky, I think Besson's real influence and inspiration comes directly from the black and white printing of certain comic books.

The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec [Jacques Tardi, 1976]:

For example.

Themroc [Claude Faraldo, 1973]:

The Last Battle takes place in a world without language. While set in a potential future ravaged by war or disaster, it's an image of the future informed by the distant past. The regression of characters and conditions to an almost medieval of even pre-historic level, seems to owe something to Themroc, another absurdist film in which language has become inexpressive as a symptom of societal collapse.

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior [George Miller, 1981]:

The Road Warrior is another film that views the future through a reflection of the past, finding in its ravaged wastelands something redolent of the American west. As one of the most influential films of the 1980s, it's hard not to see the image of Mel Gibson as the battle warn scavenger in the conception of the central characters of Besson's first feature.

Like Miller's film, the world of The Last Battle is one of rubble and ruin. The protagonist, another brooding survivor scavenging the wastelands for scrap metal and car parts to construct a primitive glider, takes shelter in a high rise office building marooned in the middle of an arid desert. Into this world, a gang of feral criminals seek retribution from the scavenger, who has previously invaded the inner-sanctum of their scrapheap compound; another reminder of the autogeddon nightmares of Miller's aforementioned film.

In the image of this graveyard of wrecked cars Besson latches onto something previously touched upon by both Jean-Luc Godard in his proto-apocalyptic masterpiece Week End (1967) and the English author J.G. Ballard in his unsettling psychological novel "Crash" (published 1973): in short, the image of the automobile as a symbol for the twentieth century, with wider connotations of escape, freedom, consumer consumption, death and civilisation. For both Godard and Ballard, the car crash is a shorthand for the collapse of civilisation: a sign the things have stopped moving; that the world and life have collided with some unmovable object and reached a standstill. The same seems true for Besson.

Week End [Jean-Luc Godard, 1967]:

The Last Battle [Luc Besson, 1983]:

It's perhaps in part due to the cult nature of The Last Battle that Besson's subsequent films were treated more like art-house variations on mainstream genres rather than as mainstream movies with pretentions to depth. While not characteristic of the Besson of recent decades, The Last Battle nonetheless establishes many of the key themes and preoccupations that have continued to develop throughout the filmmaker's subsequent work: stoic, almost childlike warriors trapped in a cycle of violence; an older mentor figure living in seclusion; an emphasis on worlds and world-building; a problematic view of women as prizes or possessions; a high-style approach that results in a lingering atmosphere and countless arresting images.

As his first feature-length science-fiction film, The Last Battle endears itself, albeit vaguely, to two of Besson's later films within the same genre: the excellent The Fifth Element (1997) and the dreadful Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017). Each film shows the development (or corruption) of the Besson aesthetic as it moves further and further away from the wordless, abstract, dreamlike, black and white stylisation of the film in question to become something that appears closer to the work of any other mainstream Hollywood practitioner.

At his peak in the 1990s, Besson was one of the filmmakers who defined the cinematic zeitgeist. Taking a healthy influence from Hong Kong filmmakers like John Woo and Ringo Lam (themselves heavily influenced by French filmmakers like Jean-Pierre Melville) and then filtering their particular brand of heightened heroic bloodshed back through the iconography of comic books, fashion photos, pop videos, advertising and a particular brand of Gallic eccentricity, Besson succeeded in created influential works, such as La Femme Nikita (1990) and Léon (The Professional, 1994), all leading towards the completion of his long-gestating passion project (and return to science-fiction), The Fifth Element.

The Fifth Element [Luc Besson, 1997]:

Taking a small measure of influence from the French comic book artist and writer Jean Giraud, aka Moebius, The Fifth Element is a dazzling visual achievement that never feels generic or derivative of other films. It's a great example of a filmmaker being given the biggest budget of their career but still producing something that is absolutely infused with their own personality and recognisable cinematic aesthetic.

On its release, The Fifth Element was a film that looked like nothing else. Its imagery, scale, effects and imagination were extraordinary. No other mainstream blockbuster released in 1997 could compare to its ambition and originality. Even now, over twenty years later, it remains a unique, even daring work of big budget, high-concept weirdness. A perfect synthesis of Besson's comic book influences and his own pop-cinema aesthetic, which had been developing across his previous films.

Like The Last Battle, Besson's The Fifth Element encapsulates everything that is great about the director's work - his visual imagination, his propensity for action, his post-modernism, his dopey, if not naive sense of romanticism -  but also its glaring flaws. Besson is hopeless at comedy, both visual and verbal, and yet insists on peppering his work with comedic 'beats', as if terrified that the films will seem self-serious if robbed of such moments of would-be mirth. He allows actors to over-emote to almost pantomime levels, turning characters into caricatures; less fully-formed human beings than a collection of verbal or physical tics. Worst of all, he's entirely deficient when it comes to the creation of female characters, and has a truly terrible grasp of modern sexual politics.

One of the things I'd like to look at in a later post is Besson's supposed feminism. It speaks to the dearth of strong female characters (and strong female voices) in the action genre of the 1980s and early 1990s that Besson's work was ever considered empowering, but apparently it was. Give a girl a gun and let her play as dirty as the boys and suddenly you're not just subverted genre tropes, you've created a movement: but is this empowerment or male fantasy? Besson's feminist credentials were deeply problematic even before the recent sexual assault allegations made against him in the wake of the #MeToo movement, and the thread of sexism that runs throughout his work is already manifest in the characterisation of Leeloo, played here by Milla Jovovich.

The Fifth Element [Luc Besson, 1997]:

Though ostensibly a film aimed at family audiences, Besson indulges in several scenes of casual female nudity. In each instance, the nudity is presented as matter-of-fact and non-sexualised, but it's also deeply voyeuristic and often objectifies the character at her most vulnerable.

Leeloo is the archetypical Bessonian heroine. She's a lean, athletic warrior-woman capable of seducing and destroying men with her physicality. She looks like a fashion model and freely objectifies herself. She's also completely childlike, simple-minded and devoid of agency. She obeys the men who act as her guardians and seems pre-programmed to fall in love with them. While a talented fighter and led by a noble cause, she's ultimately a prop, there to be used by the hero (and director) to engender sympathy, compassion, action or titillation. The pattern of the Bessonian heroine is simple: shut up, look great and remain subservient to the male lead.

Leeloo survives as a character thanks to Jovovich. As an actor she instils the character with a real warmth and emotion that gives her a complexity perhaps lacking on the page. She also has a genuine chemistry with her co-star Bruce Willis, which makes a tired romantic wish-fulfilment sub-plot actually work. Despite the shortcomings of the character as written and the casual sexism that features in the majority of Besson's screenplays, Jovovich turns in a remarkable performance here, elevating both the film and the character to iconic levels, and finding some sense of humanity and vulnerability in the director's flight of adolescent fantasy.

If The Fifth Element was an example of Besson being ahead of the curve in his use of modern special effects, prosthetic work and computer generated imagery to create a fully immersive and engaging world, then "Valerian" is an example of a filmmaker playing catch up. On the surface of it, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets looks like a return to the kind of filmmaking and storytelling found in The Fifth Element. However, the appalling narrative structure and fatal miscasting of the two comic book heroes, leave the film dead on arrival. Both lead actors, Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne, have a vacant, dead-eyed quality to them, lacking both the personality and charisma necessary for the audience to feel invested in their adventures. Furthermore, the sub-Phantom Menace (1999) world-building and horribly dated sexual politics, only work to remind the audience how redundant and archaic the film is by the standards of the day.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets [Luc Besson, 2017]:

Arriving after a decade of innovative special effects driven movies by filmmakers as diverse as George Lucas, James Cameron, Lana and Lily Wachowskis and Alfonso Cuarón, to say nothing of an entire decade's worth of large-scale CGI spectacle offered by Marvel Studios' unending glut of superhero content, such as The Avengers (aka Avengers Assemble, 2012) and Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), "Valerian" doesn't have the immediate wow factor that The Fifth Element once had. While the earlier film had pegged Besson as an innovator, "Valerian" feels like imitation.

To compare Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets to The Last Battle shows how far Besson has travelled as a filmmaker. While narratively inert, vaguely sketched and not always engaging, The Last Battle is nonetheless the work of a filmmaker following a set of instincts that aren't dictated by commerce or marketability. It builds on familiar influences, like The Road Warrior and its second-hand allusions to Italian Westerns, comic books and post-apocalyptic sci-fi, and creates from it something that feels different and new.

The Last Battle remains a great showcase for the early Besson aesthetic: his keen eye for framing and use of the landscape and architectural spaces to define his characters and their worlds is already evident. It's also a film that connects to politics, albeit vaguely, illustrating the lack of prospects that young people were facing in the France of the early 1980s, and the idea of subcultures and surrogate families, which would be further explored in the director's subsequent film Subway (1985). By comparison "Valerian" looks like any other big budget fantasy film released in the 2010s. Real-world politics are largely absent, which is fine: The Fifth Element wasn't political either. But The Fifth Element does succeed on a  a level of pop-artistry and post-modern invention, which can't be said about "Valerian."

To look at these three films is to see an illustration of the rise and fall of Luc Besson. From his beginnings as a maker of modest cult cinema that was visually distinctive and thematically interesting, to the maker of influential pop-cinema - where his imagery captured the opulence, scale and colour of classic comic books long before Hollywood had caught up to their potential - and finally beyond, to the lazy, generic filmmaker comfortable enough to recycle other people's innovations while struggling to evoke past glories.

Luc Besson

An introduction?

It might seem preposterous to consider today, but there was once a time when Luc Besson was regarded by some factions of the cineaste mainstream as one of the coolest and most exciting filmmakers of his generation. For kids like me discovering movies at the end of the 1990s, Besson's name was a shorthand for a particular type of haute couture action cinema, which became a brand unto itself. A younger, more energetic cinema: lionised at the time by the generation of critics that came before us, who responded to what they perceived as Besson's subversion of the kind of mannered, bourgeois, domestic movies that typified the supposedly staid French cinema of the period.

The narrative surrounding Besson during this stage of his career was that his work cut through what many English-speaking critics saw as the pretentious or elitist nature of his native cinema, and opened it up to a new audience looking for style, action and emotional intensity. Besson's biggest hits from this period, Subway (1985), The Big Blue (1988), La Femme Nikita (1990) and his supposed pinnacle, Léon (or The Professional, 1994), delivered mainstream excess, action and violence, but with a creative eye for the kind of fashionable stylisation often found on the margins of the European art-house.

The films were fast-moving, erupting onto the screen with a burst of kinetic action and physicality - shoot-outs and car-chases taken shot-for-shot from either Hollywood or Hong Kong genre cinema: here supplanted into the suburbs of surrounding Paris, an alien's view of New York city, or some far off intergalactic setting - but they also contained an emphasis on oddball characters, moments of comedic eccentricity, and a romantic tone at odds with the scenes of violence and brutality. In short: Besson's films apparently made audiences feel as if they were watching something with a highbrow or artistic sensibility, while at the same time satiating them with a surface level sensationalism, simple plotting and characters devoid of agency or depth.

Reading Susan Hayward's eponymous 1998 study on Besson and his films (published as part of the series 'French Film Directors', which includes similar volumes on everyone from Jean Epstein and Georges Melies, to Catherine Breillat and Leos Carax), is currently doing for me what great criticism should: making me think about the work from a different perspective; opening it up to broader, more critical readings; placing the films into wider, political, social and aesthetic frameworks; providing context and justification.

Luc Besson [Susan Hayward/Manchester University Press, 1998]:

Hayward's book was published at the exact moment when Besson was at the pinnacle of his early career. The time at which infant millennials with a burgeoning interest in all things film, like myself, were being told by the still young critics of Generation X that this Besson guy was the real deal. A year later Besson would release his first outright critical and commercial failure, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999), and from here would descend further along a path that has led to terrible films like Arthur and the Invisibles (2006), Lucy (2014) and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017), among others.

Given this late career shift, which has seen Besson progress from being someone known primarily as a writer and director of acclaimed cult cinema to a writer and producer of successful B-movies, such as Taxi (1998), The Transporter (2002), Taken (2008) and their resulting franchises, all of which were box-office hits despite often terrible reviews, it would be interesting to see a revised and updated version of Hayward's book that includes the filmmaker's subsequent efforts, as well as an examination of some of the more contentious elements of his work - specifically his depiction of women - against the sexual assault allegations that have since been levelled against him.

Today, Besson isn't considered very "cool" by the mainstream film community, and with good reason. Of his work over the past twenty-two years I've only found merit in two of his features: Angel-A (2005) and The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (2010). Even some of his earlier films that impressed me as an adolescent have since been re-evaluated and have fallen significantly in my estimation. However, a combination of nostalgia and the persuasive writing of Hayward is nonetheless making me curious to go back and look at these films in an attempt to discuss how they tie into the narrative of Besson's career, and his often problematic and contradictory worldview.

In the spirit of this, I've written some thoughts on Besson's films, beginning with his first, the wordless post-apocalyptic fantasy The Last Battle (1983) and its links to the director's later science-fiction efforts, specifically The Fifth Element (1997) and the aforementioned "Valerian." However, I'm still struggling to find a point to this that might be worth making: a reason for committing to the article, as both a project and a theme, given my absence of any genuine passion for the subject matter. In a world where so many films that are great and meaningful to me are ignored and denigrated by the popular culture, is it really worth my time to be analysing Besson's work from a perspective of cynicism? I don't know. Hopefully as I delve deeper into Hayward's discourse, which is so-far fascinating, some points and counter points will become clear.