First prize at the Montreal Festival

cinema awards French director and producer Luc Besson was named yesterday as the first laureate of the Montreal International Film Festival. On August 22, at the opening, he will be awarded the Grand Special Prize of the Americas for his exceptional contribution to contemporary cinema. And the festival itself will open with a film by Canadian Manon Briand, La Turbulence des fluides, co-produced by Besson. Mikhail Kommersant-TROFIMENKOV comments.
You can’t argue with miracles: not at all like a fairy-tale prince who emerged from the post-punk underground, disheveled short Luc Besson really defeated the Hollywood dragon, hated by French patriots and seemingly invincible. A storyteller of the new age era, he conquered both the Old and New Worlds with his stories about the inhabitants of the night subway, dolphin people, the killer Nikita yearning for quiet family happiness, nymphets who are friends with autistic killers, and half-naked messengers of extraterrestrial civilizations. From "Subway" (1985) to "The Fifth Element" (1997), his films were distinguished by a sophisticated and light fantasy, were at once loose and exciting and carefully thought out, appealing to the reinforced concrete standards of genre cinema and playfully deconstructing them. Thanks to him, French directors took a breath of fresh globalist air, opened their eyes and shook off the ashes of the national fetish, the intimate tradition of the “new wave”, in order to take on ambitious and commercially successful super productions: from “Crimson Rivers” and “Vidocq” to “Asterix and Obelix."
Besson once vowed that, having made ten films, he would devote himself entirely to producing and screenwriting. "Jeanne d'Arc" (2000) became his eighth opus. But no matter how inventive the films of Besson the director are, the films of Besson the producer are just as stereotypical, “dumb and dumber”, breaking the box office. They are built according to a simple scheme: heroes endowed with a certain gift demonstrate it for an hour and a half of screen time, without worrying about a sane script alibi. In "Taxi" (Taxi, 1998) these are the dangerous pirouettes of the infantile Marseilles ace taxi driver. In “The Dancer” (2000) there are close to shamanic dances of a black deaf-mute dancer. In "Yamakasi" (2001) - the ability of suburban thugs to climb sheer walls. There are exceptions: having become friends with actor Gary Oldman on the set of “The Fifth Element,” Besson generously produced his directorial debut “Intravenous Nutrition” (Nil by Mouth, 1997), a sickening “author’s” sleaze about the lives of alcoholics and heroin addicts .
Proud of Besson for challenging Hollywood, the French public watches his exploits with a sacred horror that has replaced their former fascinated admiration. Besson seems to be deliberately cultivating the image of a greedy, arrogant, unscrupulous producer. When he headed the jury of the Cannes Film Festival in 2000, the most affectionate nickname given to him by journalists was Pokemon. Filmmakers nicknamed him Bitocephale for his hypertrophied, to put it mildly, sexuality. The most correct translation is “penis-headed.” At the risk of being fired, many female technical staff simply refuse to work with him.
He is also considered dishonest. Screenwriter Gerard Darde counted 64 matches between “Taxi” and his script, which he unanswered to Besson back in 1994. Besson defended himself in court: they say he received the script, but did not read it. And he prevented a lawsuit with American director Catherine Bigelow by allegedly paying her $11 million two days before the trial for the misappropriated script about Joan of Arc. Otherwise, the American market would be lost to him.
They remember again and again how he drove his wife Anne Parillaud to nervous exhaustion on the set of Nikita. Add to this the death of a Czech cameraman on the set of “Joan of Arc”, which is being discussed in the press, due to neglect of safety precautions, meager pay for extras, tyrannical attitude towards directors, drunken brawls of film crews and unauthorized accession to his castle in Cap Benat. 200 sq. m, which he had to return after three trials, and you get an almost parodic image of a nouveau riche shark. Once again the ancient story about the knight who, having overcome the monster, turned into it himself, was repeated. However, the winners are not judged, even if they grow fangs and armored tails.

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 143 dated 08/14/2002, p. 13

Authors:

Mikhail Trofimenkov

Luc Besson has caught up and surpassed America