Anniversary of The Fifth Element

The 50th Anniversary Cannes Film Festival began on May 7, 1997 with the premiere of Luc Besson's "The Fifth Element". Being the opening film of the festival, "The Fifth Element" did not participate in the competition.

In the same 1997, Luc Besson's film was nominated for the European Film Academy Award, but was left without an award. European film academics preferred the British comedy "The Full Monty" directed by Peter Cattaneo to him. French Film Academy in 1998 nominated Luc Besson's film "The Fifth Element" for their Cesar Award in 8 categories. In three of them the film won, including Luc Besson received Cesar as Best Director. But in the category of Best Film "The Fifth Element" lost to Alain Resnais's musical "On connaît la chanson (Same Old Song)". Luc Besson's film had no other serious festival achievements.

But the financial results of the painting by Luc Besson were much more impressive. Firstly, with a budget of $90 million, the film became the most expensive European film at the time of its release. Secondly, the box office picture of 263 million dollars made it the leader of the French box office. And so it remained until 2011, when he was surpassed in this capacity by the film "The Intouchables" by Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano.

Another peculiar record of the picture can be considered the period that has passed from the moment of the birth of the idea to the moment of the embodiment of this idea on the screen. Luc Besson sketched the first version of the script for the picture when he was 16 years old. He was inspired to create this screenplay by the 1981 Canadian animated film "Métal hurlant (Heavy Metal)". One of the plot lines of this film was the adventures of a cynical taxi driver from a squalid futuristic New York, who becomes involved with a girl in trouble, who is relentlessly pursued by murderous thugs. In 1997, when "The Fifth Element" was released, Luc Besson was already 38 years old.

The "Heavy Metal" movie mentioned above was, in turn, based on the L'Incal comic book series by renowned French-Chilean artist and director Alejandro Jodorowsky ("Holy Mountain"). After the release of The Fifth Element, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Les Humanoïde Associés, which published comics, filed a lawsuit against Luc Besson with accusations of plagiarism. The case was considered for several years, until, finally, in 2004, the plaintiffs were denied due to the "extreme insignificance" of the borrowings made by Besson.

It was no coincidence that the taxi driver became the main character of the film "The Fifth Element", as well as several other films by Luc Besson. The fact is that Luc Besson's parents were diving instructors, and Luc was going to continue the family tradition as a child. But, while still a schoolboy, while diving, he was injured and was forced to part with this childhood dream. It was then that he decided to link his fate with cinema, and his father, in order to earn money for his son's cinematic education, worked as a taxi driver for several years.

The assessment of Luc Besson's film by film critics was very ambiguous. For example, Roger Ebert, who gave the film three stars out of a possible 4, described the film as follows, literally a day after the premiere:

""The Fifth Element," which opened the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday, is one of the great goofy movies--a film so preposterous I wasn't surprised to discover it was written by a teenage boy".

An even more derogatory characterization of the film was given by The New York Times film reviewer Janet Maslin:

""The Fifth Element" is a big-budget French effort to play the Hollywood cartoon blockbuster game. It's also proof that Besson, whose big ambitions and technological expertise have made him one of France's highest-profile younger directors, is also his nation's worst nightmare. Co-opted by international comic book style, Besson pitches this gaudy epic at a teen-age audience that values hot design over plot coherence, hollow excitement over reason."

However, it is possible that in the assessments of American film critics one can see resentment for American cinema, the reason for which was hinted at by one of the most authoritative Russian film critics, Sergei Kudryavtsev. In his review of the film, Kudryavtsev, who rated the film "The Fifth Element" with 8 points out of 10, called it

"truly the most "cool" and "banter" work of Luc Besson, which, anthologising crime or science fiction films, as a rule, of American production, in a light parodic form, makes fun of recognizable situations, characters, and even individual characteristic words or frames."

Another well-known Russian film critic Yevgeny Nefyodov also felt the irony towards American cinema in the film. In the review, he wrote:

"The authors do not cross the line and do not give ... the action a totally parodic character, but they can hardly restrain themselves, telling an utterly hackneyed and primitive story with a straight face. In principle, the hidden irony is felt all the time, whether it be the indispensable smirks of a full-time Hollywood superman, neutralizing an unlucky street robber ... or participating in a tense shootout, or the impenetrability of overweight wrestler Tom Lister Jr. in the guise of President Lindbergh. However, of course, Chris Tucker feels the director's super-task best of all, who does not hold back at all, in some places - frankly overacting, portraying the mannered and narcissistic DJ Ruby Rod, "the vicious child of show business.""

The following figures speak about the assessment of the film by ordinary moviegoers. 67% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users rated the film from 8 to 10, and 21% of users rated the film at the maximum - "ten". With this indicator and the above, the rating of Luc Besson's film "The Fifth Element" according to FilmGourmand version was 8,240, which allowed it to take 456th Rank in the Golden Thousand.