There’s usually a certain comfort in these directors’ collections, a consistency of tone or genre. We know what we’re in for.
Not so when it comes to the works of French director Luc Besson.
The seven films here swerve wildly from taut thrillers and wildlife documentaries to garish space operas, meandering arthouse and monochrome, post-apocalyptic fables.
Besson’s eclectic, spectacle-driven approach means that different titles stand out from his oeuvre with each return visit.
This time around, for me, it was Subway and The Fifth Element.
In some ways, the pair represent opposite poles of his filmmaking.
The former sees Besson eschewing the conventions of mainstream cinema, while the latter sees him embrace Hollywood (on his own terms, of course). In Subway, Fred (Christopher Lambert) is a safe-breaker who hides out in the Paris Metro tunnels. Along the way, he falls in love with a beautiful woman and starts a rock band. Nothing makes any real sense, but there’s a seductive dreamlike quality to proceedings that means we’re in no hurry to return to street level.
In The Fifth Element, Besson’s eye for the unlikely is used to embellish a cracking thriller in which Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich face off against intergalactic forces of darkness and Gary Oldman (pictured), in one of his most unhinged performances. You can feel the director straining at the limits of the mainstream, while revelling in his unlimited budget.
There are dog-headed aliens, high-altitude traffic jams and a bright-blue opera singer. The result is as idiosyncratic as it is entertaining, at once arthouse and action-packed.
