Word: besson
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Daisy Miller, only shriller. That's how European filmmakers have often pictured the American woman. In Luc Besson's The Big Blue, Arquette has to whine, pout, plead, giggle, all to get the attention of an otherworldly deep- ( sea diver (Jean-Marc Barr). But he has eyes only for dolphins and, vagrantly, for his fiercest competitor (Jean Reno). Two men dive to the depths -- and, perhaps, the death -- while she stays behind and paints Barr's apartment. Arquette has always looked like the last wanton of Woodstock, taunting the zippered-up '80s with her lithe carnality. But here...
Subway, Luc Besson's retarded new film about crime and punishment in the Parisian underground, is everything you'd expect from the post-Diva school of French, filmmaking: lettuce-crisp photography, a plot no less difficult to follow than the average Jacobean tragedy, plenty of MTV ear-and-eye candy, a handsome hero, a tongue-in-chic heroine, and beaucoup world-weary supporting characters who walk around with Arc de Triomphe-sized chips on their shoulders...
...Besson inflicts his audience, whom he clearly despises, with didactic-as-all-get-out musical sojourns. In one we're told that we watch too much TV. Neat-o. In another we learn, to the sound of gunfire, that people kill people. Brilliant. Other scenes are less direct. At a pointless dinner party, the pre-Madonna-esque Ford girl heroine (portrayed, through the eyelashes, by international Cover Girl Adjani), tells a roomful of squares exactly what she thinks of them. With her Bride of Frankenstein fright wig and a gutter-mouthed talent for the unprintable expletive, she makes a speech...
...until page 45 of this vastly overpraised French novel does one learn that "this is the story of François Besson." This forthright statement is doubly reassuring, because it has been preceded by a weird and frenzied surrealistic opener in which the world crazily assumes the aspect of a petrified urban forest, "a deserted planet, full of signs and booby traps...
Thus unmasked as the leader of a counterfeit gold coin ring, the 24-year-old, French Canadian Besson admitted that high finance was in his blood-he was a nephew of the late, crack-pate deputy Philibert Hippolyte Marcelin Besson, called "the Incredible," famed for his Ed Wynn hairdo and his Europa Dollar. The Incredible, who flourished in the '303, had a theory: Europe could cure its ills in a jiffy by adopting his "international currency based on hours of labor." He burned up the Continent's roads on a motorcycle with wide-open cutout trying to peddle...