Lucy

There’s a scene towards the end of Lucy where Scar­lett Johansson’s drug-enhanced title char­ac­ter has learned to use more than 80 per cent of her cere­bral cor­tex, and is rapid­ly evolv­ing into a per­fect cross between Dr Man­hat­tan and a high-end per­fume ad.

As sta­lag­mites of gooey black nan­otech­nol­o­gy ooze from Lucy’s body and the film begins to feel like a glossy ver­sion of Aki­ra (only one that wouldn’t dare infringe on the beau­ty of its star), Luc Besson’s vision for the film final­ly comes into per­fect focus: this isn’t just the sto­ry of a woman who realis­es the full poten­tial of her brain, it’s also the sto­ry of a film­mak­er remem­ber­ing the full poten­tial of his genre.

In a 1985 inter­view con­duct­ed by ​‘The New York Times’, Besson attempt­ed to val­i­date his gen­er­a­tion of French direc­tors — often accused of being greater styl­ists than sto­ry­tellers — by pre­dict­ing that, ​“Our ardor alone is going to shake the pil­lars of the moviemak­ing estab­lish­ment”. Since co-found­ing Europa­Corp in 2000 and sub­se­quent­ly grow­ing it into one of the largest ful­ly inte­grat­ed inde­pen­dent stu­dios in the world, Luc Besson seems to be run­ning on ardor alone.

Revered as one of the finest and most eccen­tric com­mer­cial film­mak­ers of the 1990s, Besson cashed in the rep­u­ta­tion he built on the strength of con­tem­po­rary action clas­sics like Léon and The Fifth Ele­ment in order to own and oper­ate a fac­to­ry where less­er tal­ents could pho­to­copy the Ciné­ma du Look play­book with all of his style and none of his grace. That wild­ly reduc­tive take on EuropaCorp’s out­put aside, it can’t be denied that, in the years since the foun­da­tion of his stu­dio, Besson has become less of a film­mak­er than an empire (a point that becomes dou­bly con­vinc­ing when con­sid­er­ing the films that he’s direct­ed dur­ing that time).

Which is all to say that as far as Scar­lett Johans­son vehi­cles are con­cerned, Lucy is a ver­i­ta­ble time machine. One of the most excit­ing, bril­liant and insane action films in recent mem­o­ry, Lucy doesn’t feel like the work of some­one who has a stu­dio on the line so much as it does the work of some­one who has absolute­ly noth­ing to lose (least of all his mind). As a result, what seemed like a rather dubi­ous propo­si­tion has – against all odds – almost sin­gle-hand­ed­ly redeemed a sum­mer of turgid block­buster cinema.

Lucy is Luc Besson’s The Tree of Life, and so it fol­lows that the film’s ambi­tion goes hand in hand with its goofi­ness. The movie begins by con­sid­er­ing the entire scope of life on earth before cen­tring its atten­tion on a blonde Amer­i­can par­ty girl named Lucy (Scar­lett Johans­son) whose time in Taipei is about to take a turn for the weird. The new Dan­ish boyfriend she met in a night­club (natch) is forc­ing her to deliv­er a shady pack­age to a shadier busi­ness man (Old­Boy star Choi Min-sik as Mr Jang), and in a mat­ter of min­utes Lucy’s intestines – like those of the diva in The Fifth Ele­ment – are going to become the new home for a very pre­cious pack­age: a mas­sive quan­ti­ty of a drug called CPH4.

The pack­age bursts, thou­sands of the lit­tle blue crys­tals inside begin to spill into her blood­stream, and what begins as the great­est Adder­all rush of all time quick­ly evolves into some­thing more pro­found as the chem­i­cal com­pound soon allows Lucy to tap into the dor­mant poten­tial of the human brain. The once unre­mark­able young woman soon begins bust­ing down the cere­bral lev­ees that lim­it us from see­ing space-time and mak­ing bet­ter block­busters, but when Lucy’s body threat­ens to dis­in­te­grate if she doesn’t receive addi­tion­al dos­es of the drug, she jets off to Paris in search of a promi­nent sci­en­tist (Mor­gan Free­man as Pro­fes­sor Nor­man) who might have an idea how to solve this most unusu­al problem.

On the day that Lucy opened in the US, a note that Besson alleged­ly attached to the front page of his film’s script began to cir­cu­late around the web. ​“This film is extreme­ly visu­al”, Besson wrote. ​“It is dif­fi­cult to describe in words with­out run­ning the risk of los­ing or bor­ing the read­er.” Yup. ​“The begin­ning is Léon, the mid­dle is Incep­tion, and the end is 2001: A Space Odyssey.” Who needs critics?

But if both the film’s var­i­ous forms are so know­ing­ly famil­iar, it’s how Besson vio­lent­ly mash­es them togeth­er that allows Lucy to become some­thing vibrant and new. The movie is like a Frankenstein’s mon­ster that bor­rows limbs from four dif­fer­ent species and some­how runs faster than any of them did when they were whole and mov­ing as nature intend­ed. Lucy lacks the heart of Leon, the grace of Incep­tion, and the grav­i­tas of 2001, but it has the courage not to care.

The movie may be about a woman who becomes unfath­omably intel­li­gent, but it also dares to be stu­pid. A per­fect exam­ple can be found at the top of the film, Besson inter­cut­ting the botched drug exchange with archival footage of a tiger hunt­ing and killing a gazelle. Even the most pas­sive of view­ers will pick up on the obvi­ous mean­ing of this dialec­tic mon­tage, but Eisen­stein was nev­er aim­ing for sub­tle­ty. It’s the effect that’s the key, and Besson’s trans­par­ent tricks (of which this is but one of many) aren’t designed to flat­ter audi­ences, but to pre­pare them for what’s coming.

The spir­it­ed obvi­ous­ness that dri­ves the first two thirds allows Besson to bal­ance an incred­i­bly sim­ple sto­ry with its vast­ly meta­phys­i­cal reach – it’s amaz­ing how much a scat­tered hand­ful of time-lapse shots (some bor­rowed from Sam­sara) can help bridge the gap between Leon and 2001, Lucy empow­ered to cov­er an aston­ish­ing amount of ground in its brief run­ning time because Besson points view­ers towards nature, his­to­ry, and the cos­mos from the very begin­ning. The sil­ly max­i­mal­ism of his style is fun on its own (it doesn’t hurt that all of the action beats are exe­cut­ed mas­ter­ful­ly, each of the film’s 85 min­utes dense with the infor­ma­tion of two), but in hind­sight it becomes clear that Besson is also set­ting the stage for his tran­scen­dent endgame, lubri­cat­ing his audi­ence with laughter.

And the film, to be clear, is more than hap­py to have you laugh along with it. It would be a crit­i­cal mis­take to con­fuse Besson’s ambi­tion for pre­ten­sion, to for­get that the con­fi­dent chaos of the third act stems from the same movie in which a drug over­dose instant­ly trans­forms a par­ty girl into John Woo’s wettest dream. As the movie’s con­fronta­tion­al last line under­scores with an appro­pri­ate lack of sub­tle­ty, Lucy isn’t a step into a brave new world, it’s a chal­lenge to do more with the one we’ve got.

Besson isn’t rein­vent­ing action cin­e­ma, he’s sim­ply remind­ing us that it can be as lim­it­less as the cin­e­ma, itself. Besson may nev­er have left, but it sure is great to have him back.