Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Fifth Element
1997 · Luc Besson · The Fifth Element on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice the orange and electric blue coming off every surface. (light)
Thierry Arbogast lights interiors as if each wall, panel and costume were its own lamp. The palette runs on primaries at full strength and refuses the gray metal that had governed screen science fiction since Alien.
Payoff: Color is not describing these rooms. It is soaking the feeling into them, which is why the film reads as a comic page rather than a place. In the reading: affective color-image. The reading calls this affective color: hue that absorbs a scene as a mood rather than telling you what anything is made of.
Look at the clothes as fashion rather than futurewear. (setting)
Jean-Paul Gaultier designed Leeloo's strapping, the Fhloston flight uniforms and Zorg's tailoring as couture, not as extrapolation. Jean-Claude Mezieres and Moebius built the vehicles and the city around them.
Payoff: The world is assembled by a comics artist and a Paris couturier. Design carries the world-building that dialogue usually has to do.
Notice how far the city drops below the traffic lanes. (camera)
Besson keeps going to high angles over the megacity and then placing the action at cab level with the drop underneath it. The vertical axis carries the scale and the class arrangement at the same time.
Payoff: Up and down do the work here that left and right do in most films. You always know where somebody sits in this world.
Watch how often characters face the camera and pose. (staging)
Zorg's office scenes are dominance displays, the diva's number is composed head on like a ticketed performance, and Leeloo occupies Korben's cab differently from everyone else in it.
Payoff: Bodies are arranged to show you what someone is rather than to behave naturally. The staging is theater, not simulation.
Watch Oldman play a villain at full theatrical pitch. (performance)
Zorg arrives with a sculpted forelock and a molasses drawl, tuned to excess rather than to menace. Willis plays Korben sardonic and grounded as the fixed point everything else swings around.
Payoff: The caricature is deliberate. One performer stays ordinary so the others can go as far as the design does.
Once you have seen it
Watch the film stop for the aria mid-rescue. (cutting)
Sylvie Landra intercuts Plavalaguna's Donizetti with an assassin loose in the corridors and Korben fighting his way through a hallway. Three registers run at once and none of them is solving the problem.
Payoff: A rescue politely waits while you look at something beautiful. The film lives in that pause instead of hurrying back. In the reading: attraction-image. The reading calls this an attraction-image: the picture stops acting and starts presenting, staging an event as spectacle rather than moving the plot through it.
Watch Leeloo's face after she reads about war. (performance)
She has absorbed the whole history of human violence at speed, and she stops. Jovovich holds the grief without discharging it, and very nearly refuses the task she was built for.
Payoff: The biggest moment in a cosmic action film is a face going still. The film puts a held feeling where a blow belongs. In the reading: qualisign. The reading calls this a qualisign: one quality flooding an immobile face, registered and never spent on action.
Listen for the aria climbing past a human range. (sound)
Inva Mula sang the Mad Scene from Lucia di Lammermoor and the extended passage afterward was bent digitally into runs no throat could manage. Eric Serra wraps it in orchestral and electronic textures.
Payoff: Two centuries of opera get spliced to a machine. The film's taste for excess is audible before you can explain it.
Notice that the final problem is not solved by force. (structure)
Everything before it is built as a countdown against a cosmic evil, the oldest shape there is, power against power. Then the thing that works is a feeling, delivered in compressed beats rather than across an arc.
Payoff: The largest possible plot resolves on an emotion, which is why the last act lands as either moving or abrupt.
Carry this in: Notice how often the story waits while you look. Besson lets the spectacle stop the plot on purpose.