Besson: Lucy (2014)

Lucy is Luc Besson’s second film in as many years, but it feels like his first film since The Fifth Element. All the woolly, cartoony, sci-fi madness that he unleashed on the 80s and 90s is suddenly here again, as he turns his hand to one of the perennial premises of contemporary science fiction – a human who gains access to their full brain capacity, and becomes post-human in the process. Each film that has tackled this premise has tried to visualise full brain capacity in a different way – Limitless opted for the endless continuities of Google Street View, Transcendence tried to network every shot – but they’ve all framed it as an avant-garde gesture, an attempt to take cinematic language in new and unexpected directions. Lucy, by contrast, falls back upon montage, a technique so dated and unfashionable that it feels positively fresh in Besson’s vision, which quickly devolves into an extended montage sequence, imbuing everything with that slightly exhausting sense of endless difference, attentuated alterity, that distinguished his films at their most zany and memorable. On top of that, Besson interpolates found montage sequences into the film, especially nature montage sequences of the kind that you only ever really see at IMAX anymore, scoring them to Morgan Freeman’s more or less free-floating scientific ruminations, which don’t spell out the subtext so much as act as a montage-effect in themselves, a point of stasis that makes everything around them seem even more zanily off-kilter and incongruous, less and less conducive to anything resembling conventional storytelling. From the moment we meet Lucy (Scarlett Johansson), an American who's kidnapped by a drug conglomerate in China, it's clear that Besson's not offering a narrative so much as an eighty-minute experiment in mapping her movement from full-blooded human to computer chip, thanks to the brain-opening drug that the corporation accidentally forces her to ingest. And in a kind of wry counterpoint to Lost In Translation, there’s no residual humanism, no counterpoint to Lucy’s progressive alienation from herself and everything around her, as Johansson puts in a succession of performances, a full spectrum of her acting abilities, that doesn’t evolve or develop so much as mutate and intensify. Perhaps that's what finally allows Besson to satisfy his flamboyant taste for the future, his need to clutter as much flotsam and jetsam into it as possible, if only because it’s also what Lucy is trying to do, once she suddenly, exponentially realises how little time she has left as herself. Making a genuinely futuristic film in this day and age would be an achievement in itself, let alone a futuristic film set in China, a film that rivals China’s stranglehold on futurity, but Besson manages even more than that – he offers up a retro-futuristic film set in China, a wacky, wiggy montage sequence that sets out to exceed everything the future has to offer.