The Fifth Element · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the blue woman singing. Onstage at Fhloston Paradise, the diva Plavalaguna opens her mouth and out comes Donizetti — the Mad Scene from Lucia di Lammermoor, a real aria with two centuries behind it. Then the voice keeps climbing. It goes past the ceiling of any human throat, into runs that the soprano Inva Mula sang and a machine afterward bent into impossibility. And right as it peaks, Besson cuts away. He intercuts the aria with an assassin loose in the corridors and Korben fighting his way down a hallway. Three things happen at once, and not one of them is solving a problem. The film has stopped, mid-rescue, to show you something gorgeous and dare you to mind.

That pause is the key to the whole movie, and Deleuze gives us a name for it. He called it the attraction-image: a moment where the picture stops acting and starts presenting, staging an event as pure spectacle rather than moving the plot through it. Eisenstein's old phrase was the montage of attractions. The thing onscreen figures something — power, beauty, dread — instead of doing something. It sits at a hinge Deleuze marks as the reflection-image, the point where cinema stops being a chain of cause and effect and becomes a kind of display, action transposed into figure. Most films touch this register and hurry back. The Fifth Element lives there.

Which is strange, because on paper this is the purest action machine imaginable. Deleuze had a precise tag for that too: the action-image in its large form. A global situation builds and builds until a single decisive act transforms it. Here the situation could not be more global — a primordial evil, a black planet, the end of all life, the synsign or great encompasser that summons a hero. And the hero answers. Korben Dallas, Bruce Willis playing a slightly sanded-down version of his Die Hard self, perceives the threat and acts on it. The engine underneath is the binomial, the oldest shape in cinema: force against force, good against ultimate evil, two powers locked at the scale of the cosmos. The Fhloston sequence even runs the convergent, last-minute cross-cut — the assassin, the diva, the fight, all racing toward one point — that Griffith bequeathed American film. It looks, structurally, like a thriller.

But watch what Besson actually does with the engine. He keeps switching it off to admire the bodywork. Zorg, Gary Oldman's industrialist with the sculpted forelock and the molasses drawl, never really menaces anyone in the muscular sense; his office scenes are staged frontally as dominance displays, the body arranged to expose a social relation rather than to win a fight. Deleuze would call this the gest — a posture that lays bare a theatrical or social attitude, caricature by design. The diva's aria is composed head-on, like an opera you've bought tickets for. Leeloo doesn't move through Korben's cab so much as occupy it differently from everyone else, a creature staged as apart. The whole world is built out of Jean-Paul Gaultier's couture and lit, in Thierry Arbogast's hands, as though every orange and electric-blue surface were its own lamp. That is the colour-image working at full tilt: colour that doesn't describe a scene but absorbs it, soaking the feeling into the frame until the hue is the mood.

And here is the move that makes the film more than a beautiful toy. The binomial — force against force — is never actually resolved by force. The fifth element, the thing that binds the four classical ones and defeats the evil, is love. A quality. Not a bigger gun but a feeling, and feeling in Deleuze is the territory of the affection-image: an intensity registered but not discharged into action, the thing the close-up was invented to hold. Leeloo, having absorbed the entire history of human war, stops. She reads the word, and her face goes still with grief, and she nearly refuses to save us. That stillness — a single quality flooding an immobile face, what Deleuze calls a qualisign — is the most affecting thing in the picture, and it sits exactly where an action film is supposed to deliver its biggest blow. Besson resolves a cosmic action-image with an affection-image. The climax of the largest possible plot is a feeling held in a face.

None of this came from nowhere; film is a conversation, and this one is unusually easy to overhear. The vertical city of stacked traffic lanes is Lang's Metropolis finally built at the scale Lang could only fake, by way of Blade Runner's neon-lit miniatures. The idea of couture as the primary tool of world-building runs straight back to Paco Rabanne's costumes for Barbarella. Oldman's frontal camp descends from Ming in Flash Gordon. The tonal whiplash, comedy crashing into sincerity, is Gilliam's Brazil. And the exact gesture of cutting an operatic soprano against an urban chase is lifted, lovingly, from Beineix's Diva and its cinéma du look — saturated colour as emotional architecture.

What Besson did with all of it was prove something to Hollywood that Hollywood didn't quite believe: that a ninety-million-dollar blockbuster could be a fashion plate and a comic-book opera, that spectacle need not keep apologizing for itself by pretending to be plot. He let the attraction-image run the whole length of a tentpole film. Watch it again and notice how often the story politely waits while you look. The question it leaves open is the one every maximalist has to answer: when a movie loves its own surfaces this much, is the love the subject, or the distraction? In The Fifth Element it is, fittingly, the subject.