Programme notes
The Fifth Element (1997)
Summary
Luc Besson's 1997 science fiction film, starring Bruce Willis as a New York cab driver, Milla Jovovich as a being engineered to prevent the destruction of life on Earth, Gary Oldman as an arms dealer working for the approaching evil, and Chris Tucker as a hysterical intergalactic radio host. The plot is a chase after four elemental stones, but the film's real subject is its own texture.\n\nThat texture is the reason it endures. Besson had been sketching the story since he was a teenager, and the finished film looks like a European comics album brought to life: the production design draws on Jean Giraud, working as Mœbius, and on Jean-Claude Mézières, whose Valérian strips supplied the visual grammar of stacked flying traffic and lived-in future cities. The costumes are by Jean-Paul Gaultier, and they are not incidental — the film's future is one where fashion is loud, plastic and unembarrassed.\n\nThe tone swings hard and deliberately between action, farce and opera. The Diva Plavalaguna sequence, which cuts an alien aria against a fight, is the clearest statement of what the film is doing: two registers at once, played straight.
Why it matters
It was, at the time, the most expensive European-produced film ever made, and it opened the Cannes Film Festival — an unusual berth for a big-budget science fiction picture, and a signal that a French director could work at Hollywood scale without moving to Hollywood or adopting its house style.\n\nIts influence is easiest to see in how future cities are drawn. The vertical, layered, densely-populated skyline with traffic flowing between towers had appeared in comics for years, but this film put it in front of a mass audience, and it has been reproduced constantly since. Its costume and colour sense — saturated orange, exposed strapping, deliberate artificiality — arrives in fashion editorials and other films for a decade afterwards.\n\nIt also sits at an interesting point in genre history: released the same year the effects-driven blockbuster was consolidating around a serious, desaturated look, it insisted that science fiction could be ridiculous, brightly coloured and camp without being a parody. Its reputation has risen steadily as a result. Reviews on release were sharply divided; the film is now routinely treated as a design landmark.
Controversy
Chris Tucker's Ruby Rhod has been argued over since release. The character is an effeminate, screaming media personality, and how much the film is laughing at him rather than with him is a live question — some read the performance as a genuinely subversive piece of camp, others as a broad joke at the expense of both flamboyance and Blackness. Both readings have been made seriously and neither has settled.\n\nMore straightforwardly, critics at the time disagreed violently about whether the tonal swings were control or chaos. That argument has largely resolved in the film's favour, but it is worth knowing that its current status as a classic was not how it was received.