CARA’S SPACED OUT ODDITY
Crashing planets become a crashing bore as model Cara Delevingne swaps the catwalk for a sci-fi folly
WERE there an award for the most encouraging start to a movie which then turns out to be a crashing disappointment, Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets would be a strong nominee.
To the evocative strains of David Bowie’s Space Oddity, it opens in 1975 before rattling through the centuries with a series of greetings between a spaceship’s human crew and emissaries from far-flung planets.
It’s slick and funny, and replete with promise for the next two hours-plus, but very quickly, in the hands of writer- director Luc Besson, the promise turns to moondust and the end credits feel like light years away.
Besson has form. Four years ago, he paired Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Family, a comedy about a New York mafia snitch lying low in provincial France, in the care of CIA handler Tommy Lee Jones. Great cast, decent premise, but the film stank like Roquefort left out of the fridge for too long.
Besson manages the same sort of negative alchemy here. He presents an appealing double-act in the pleasing forms of Dane DeHaan as the titular Valerian, and Cara Delevingne as his girlfriend Laureline, only to place them at the heart of an increasingly ludicrous, chaotically muddled space opera.
For Besson — whose inspiration was the French comic strip Valerian And Laureline, which is also said to have coloured George Lucas’s vision for Star Wars — science-fiction seems to be a synonym for acid trip.
Thus, we also get Ethan Hawke as a riotously camp nightclub proprie-tor, pimping out a freakish dancer called Bubble, played by the pop star Rihanna. Mind you, that’s one of the more entertaining bits.
It’s all set in the 28th century, with Valerian and Laureline as intergalactic law enforcement agents, charged with tracking down those responsible for destroying the planet Mul.
Frankly, I wasn’t sorry to see the back of Mul, either. Imagine a world that looks like a gigantic Bounty advert, populated by shop-window mannequins who worship pearls and are permanently lovely to each other.
THERE’Sonly so much of it you can take. And no sooner has the apocalypse struck than we’re pitched, for no very obvious reason, into a huge bazaar full of brainless tourists in Hawaiian shirts (yup, still around in the 28th century) that is actually a giant hologram.
This film is basically a set of nutty ideas connected by what passes, none too convincingly, as a narrative. As for the other part of the title, the ‘City Of A Thousand Planets’, that’s a vast, crazy metropolis called Alpha where a multitude of different cultures rub along, or don’t rub along.
Rather like London, in fact, except with slithery jellyfish that play funny tricks with the mind if you’re daft enough to put one on your head (Laureline is, by the way).
Meanwhile, she and Valerian have their work cut out to save Alpha from sinister forces, just as Besson has his cut out trying to build a coherent plot into all this.
He does his damnedest to develop an edge in the relationship between the heroic pair, which DeHaan and Delevingne attempt gamely to convey. But no matter how prettily they snipe at each other, tedium sets in around the half-hour mark and never really lifts.
MAUDIE offers Ethan Hawke a very different role indeed, as Everett Lewis, a fish peddler in Nova Scotia in the mid-20th century.
He is a man of few words, and even those he can muster don’t come very easily to him. His life consists entirely of selling fish and looking grumpy, sometimes both at the same time. But then, in the local store, Maud ( Sally Hawkins) overhears him saying he needs a housekeeper.
Maud is crippled with arthritis, and saddled with a family who treat
her as if her afflictions were mental rather than physical.
She seems condemned to a wretched life with her miserable, controlling Aunt Ida (Gabrielle Rose), especially once her brother (Zachary Bennett) sells the family home without consulting her.
Moving into Everett’s little house, where she must also share his bed, is Maud’s exit strategy. But it doesn’t equate to happiness; he is incommunicative, moody and sometimes abusive.
He tells her brutally that she is below even the chickens in the pecking order. So she must brighten things up however she can, and does so by painting flowers and birds on the walls and windows. Gradually, thanks largely to the patronage of a wellto-do woman from New York who winters in the area, Maud evolves into a proper artist, albeit with a strangely childlike love of bright colours and simple forms.
Word spreads, a newspaper feature is followed by a TV crew, and she even sells a canvas to Vice President Richard Nixon.
Gradually, too, she and Everett find contentment. They get married first, then fall in love. In his own brusque way, he helps her deal with a terrible loss in her life.
Aisling Walsh’s film tells the true story of Maud Lewis, who died in 1970 and remains one of Canada’s best-known folk artists. With its plaintive score and bleak landscapes, it seems to unfold as slowly as a Nova Scotia winter, but it has one thunderously exciting asset in the performance of Sally Hawkins.
She brings Maud to life in heart-rending detail, her slow, luminous smile shining out from an increasingly blighted body.
Those who dish out acting awards can rarely resist the spectacle of an able-bodied actor inhabiting a broken frame; Eddie Redmayne and Daniel Day-Lewis have Oscars to show for it.
How odd that it should appear to be a British speciality. The performance of Hawkins, a Londoner, deserves the same level of acclaim.