Besson’s Fifth

Until recently, I was not aware of a Luc Besson sci-fi epic called The Fifth Element. Then, while listening to a local radio quiz program, I heard this flick enthusiastically mentioned. The premise of Go Fact Yourself is that each contestant chooses several areas of expertise, then is quizzed in detail about one of them. A recent contestant selected this film, praising it for getting her family through the stay-at-home months of the pandemic. Though science fiction is hardly my favorite genre, her passion for The Fifth Element got me interested. And I become even more so when a youngish friend admitted to having seen the film, during his growing-up years, at least six times.

 Besson, French-born, earned his spurs in the film industry via action hits like 1990’s La Femme Nikita. He released the (mostly) English-language The Fifth Element in 1997, using primarily American and British actors. Obviously it has attracted serious fans, but many critics were not impressed. In Variety, Todd McCarthy called it “a largely misfired European attempt to make an American-style sci-fi spectacular.” David Edelstein of Slate was even more emphatic: “"It may or may not be the worst movie ever made, but it is one of the most unhinged."^[

 Well, yes. With its comic-book sensibility, The Fifth Element may be wonderful to look at, but don’t expect it to make any sense. There are deeply mysterious scenes set (à la the Indiana Jones adventures) in a remote desert cavern, as well as glimpses of 23^rd century New York City, where taxicabs fly through the air, dodging gigantic office towers. In the middle of all of this is the effortlessly macho Bruce Willis as a sadsack cab driver who used to be a major in Earth’s Special Forces. Also on hand is the always interesting Gary Oldman as the sinister industrialist Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg.  Despite his very French given name, he speaks with a hushpuppies-and-magnolias accent, like that of Daniel Craig’s Detective Benoit Blanc in Knives Out, leaving me to wonder if distinguished British actors have a thing for the Deep South. Ian Holm is around as an enigmatic priest, as is Chris Tucker as an ultra-flamboyant talk show host.

 And we can hardly forget the Ukraine-born Milla Jovovich, playing a sort of outer-space creation who speaks no earthly language and wears very few clothes. She is, I’ve got to say, exactly the sort of symbolic extraterrestrial that a teenage boy might invent. Which makes sense, because Besson apparently dreamed up this entire story at age sixteen, although he had to wait twenty-two years to put it on  the big screen. The few females who populate the film—playing mostly flight attendants and MacDonalds employees—barely speak, but they have fabulous bodies set off by suggestively revealing costumes. (There’s only one woman with any real clout, and she’s a “big bruiser” type archly named Major Iceborg.)

 The Fifth Element is a great movie to watch on a widescreen TV in the wee hours. The plot hardly matters, verbal wit is rare, and if you drift off to sleep you basically won’t miss much. Suffice it to say that in this film the world is on the brink of disaster, but it all ends as happily as you would expect, with Willis and Jovovich pairing up to lead the heroics. Just exactly what a sixteen-year-old boy would want.

.Speaking of which, this is the second film I’ve recently seen in which the director ended up canoodling with the leading lady in real life. Which perhaps tells you something about directors.