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25 years ago, Luc Besson’s mega-hit The Fifth Element was released in Russian cinemas. Evil returns to Earth at least once every five thousand years, and Love and Beauty will be able to defeat it – today the plot and world invented by the French director seem utopian.
According to the theory put forward by the popular book The Best Year in Movie History. How 1999 Changed Everything,” cinema—at least mass and audience cinema—reached its peak at the end of the last century. 1999 was indeed a year of great accomplishments. But in fairness it should be said that almost every year of the end of the millennium brought a phenomenal harvest to cinema and viewers. If we take, for example, 1997, then the lists of premieres will show up movie hits that we would gladly review today: Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black, James Cameron’s Titanic, Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke, Jackie Brown Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher’s The Game, Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, Curtis Hanson’s LA Confidential. Not least on this list of the best is The Fifth Element, directed by Luc Besson, the most commercially successful French author at the time, exploiting typical Hollywood standards with European sophistication.
To the multi-million dollar plan, in which space cyberpunk meets a naive fairy tale, Besson went from his youth. By the author’s own admission, on paper, The Fifth Element was born when he was still at school and lived with his father 60 kilometers from Paris. The Fifth Element as we know it—deeply comical, bright as a breakfast cereal box—does have a teenage vibe to it. The project took on a real shape only after 15 years of Besson’s work in the cinema, when the heroes of The Underground, The Blue Abyss, Nikita, and Leon were already crowding behind him. Initially, the idea seemed to Besson himself so voluminous (a graphomaniac is hidden in every teenage writer) that two whole films were planned for its implementation. The budget required for their production was estimated by the producers at $ 150 million – an incredible amount for the end of the last century (20 years later, a similar estimate will be drawn for Besson’s Valerian, but the director will approach its creation already in the status of an unconditional classic and an experienced filmmaker). It seems that the author himself realized the redundancy of appetites – and as a result managed to compress the available material to two hours of screen time.
Not all dream projects are destined to take place in reality, but fate favored Besson. First, at a joint dinner in Malibu with Demi Moore, he managed to get along with her husband Bruce Willis and forward his script to him, bypassing the predatory agents of the chief specialist in the ironic action movie. He, having read the script about a retired space commando, rusting behind the steering wheel of a flying taxi, made a discount. Secondly, Besson saw the potential of a powerful action heroine in nineteen-year-old Mile Jovovich, who came to the casting with green eyelashes and white leather boots with hefty heels. In the loose glamorous young lady, Besson saw that Lila, whom he then showed to the viewer through the eyes of Korben Dallas. Not a fashionable thing, but a strange girl who blinked her eyes outrageously and babbled something in her space. Two stars collided and created, as the film puts it, a “big bada boom,” combining the designs of Jean Paul Gaultier with the wreckage of the treasury of world fiction. In The Fifth Element, high-end pieces of the genre (like Blade Runner and Star Wars) met cheaper films (like Judge Dredd), and the latest digital technologies were opposed by old-fashioned animatronics and artsy sets – this is how its amazing cacophony was born.
A film that directly stated that television causes brain liquefaction, the villain was obsessed with a big story and resentment, and the superhero could not cope with smoking and a cat, where the black president took care of the well-being of the whole world, and genetic engineering helped him in this, where the main media star (the brilliant performance of Chris Tucker) was gender elusive, and the military, disillusioned with missiles, relied on the help of an incomprehensible migrant from another planet, a blue-skinned singer and a shabby esoteric (and how else, after all, only Love can defeat Evil), could be generated only the seething multicultural cauldron of the 1990s. This is a globalist picture made by a French film crew in the studios of the British studio Pinewood, with American and British stars in the frame. Crowning this design, of course, was Mila Jovovich, a native of Kiev, the daughter of a Serb and a Russian, who spent the first years of her life in Moscow, and then played in the house of Brian De Palma, where her parents who emigrated to the United States worked as servants.
In the history-beating world of the mid-nineties, this approach seemed to be taken for granted. Perhaps, the pacifist message even gave off mothballs – all you need is love – are you serious? Isn’t this palpable banality of the message responsible for the film’s relatively modest achievements at the international box office? In the box office of 1997, The Fifth Element paid off, and only: 263 million combined fees mean that investors of the 90 millionth film, after the costs of rental, promotion and advertising, remained in a small plus? But the years go by, and the film made by Besson does not age. From a distance of a quarter of a century, this idyllic construct seems to be evidence of a multicultural, globalist utopia that has gone into oblivion, in which humanity, alas, did not linger longer, an ideal place in which the death clouds of the apocalypse dissipated with one final kiss.
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