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.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Notice how often the story waits while you look. Besson lets the spectacle stop the plot on purpose.