Word: bessone
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...SUPERIORITY COMPLEX. Many new acquirers start lecturing too soon. "You think because you have been successful in your own company abroad, you can run a U.S. firm the same way just because you have acquired the company," says Michel Besson, the French chief executive of CertainTeed, a maker of building materials based in Valley Forge, Pa. "You tend to underestimate their strengths and overlook your own weaknesses." An executive of a West German- owned U.S. subsidiary recalls a dramatic showdown: "Their people would come here and put down our people, our work ethics. I had a little problem with that...
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...