Super woman of the cerebral kind
Once again, the main protagonist of a Luc Besson film is a strong female, transformed in unusual ways, writes Tom Roston
“I am interested in showing the strength of women and the weakness of men”
AS ONE of France’s most successful filmmakers, Luc Besson figured the woman next to him at a Bordeaux dinner party was an aspiring actress, someone like the mayor’s cousin, hoping to get a foot in the door. But it turned out that she studied cancer cells for a living.
“When you get cancer,” he recalled with wonder, “in fact you are dying by immortality, because the cells that get cancer are not dead. I wanted to learn more.”
The two talked for several hours at that long-ago event, and Besson, 55, researched the subject further with the new idea of making “an entertaining film with a philosophical point of view” about the function of brain cells and how humans supposedly use just 10 per cent of their cerebral capacity. (Although the film takes that figure at face value, scientists have long said we use virtually all of our brain.) And so Lucy, which is being released on 29 August, was born.
In it, the title character, an American student in Taiwan (played by Scarlett Johansson), stumbles into a smuggling underworld and goes from terrified victim to superhuman when she is exposed to a new drug that increases her mental capabilities exponentially.
The central character Lucy – a woman who defies expectations – is a signature of many of Besson’s films, especially women who transform themselves into unusual heroines and persevere in violent tales. They include a criminal turned government assassin in La Femme Nikita (1990), a wisecracking 12-year-old girl who falls for a hit man with a pet plant in Léon:
T he Professional (1994) and an alien who saves the universe in The Fifth
Element (1997). Since then, Besson has directed
eight films including the Arthur animation trilogy, but he never seems to grow tired of strong female leads, as demonstrated by Angel-A (2005), The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle
Blanc-Sec (2009) and The Lady (2011), the last of which starred Michelle Yeoh as the Burmese Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. Although Lucy might suggest that he is returning to this motif, that was not his intention.
“If I redo the film I’ve done before, what’s the point?” Besson says. “The purpose, the story about the brain, was ten times more important.” To illustrate the character’s evolution, he needed to start with “a girl who can’t defend herself, that’s the worst situation I can find”.
As the drug’s effect on Lucy increases, she begins to see, and control, reality on a subatomic level. To Johansson, before that transition, “Lucy could be anyone”, she says. “Any searching 20-something.”
In preparing for the role, Johansson asked Besson about Lucy’s background, and he presented her with 25 pages on “her first love, when she got her period, everything”, he says. He had that ready “so I could feel strong”, he says. “It’s a way to show your actor that she can trust you.”
Alas, the back story ended up not mattering much because Lucy quickly goes into “fight-or-flight primal mode” Johansson says, adding that the broader themes that inspired Besson were compelling, but not exactly relevant to her performance.
“My job was to play a character who is desperately trying to connect to the person she once was, so that she can exist through this transition,” she says. “What she is experiencing is not philosophical. It’s physical.
“When Luc first described the character’s journey, it seemed like the culmination of all of his work,” she continues. “Because, by the end, Lucy transcends time and space, and the rules of character didn’t apply. He could have free rein.”
Besson has always been drawn to opposites, he says: “I am interested in showing the strength of women and the weakness of men.”
His heroines have roots in the screen sirens he admired as a youth, those he thought embodied “ultimate femininity – also, tough”, he says. He cites Faye Dunaway’s roles in Bonnie and Clyde, The Thomas Crown Affair
and Network. He also favours turns by Lauren Bacall, Audrey Hepburn, Mia Farrow and Shelley Duvall. “A mix of glamour and little bird,” he says. Besson’s first film to attract notice,
Subway in 1985, starred Isabelle Adjani as the refined wife of a gangster. Besson says that he created her character as a symbol of the bourgeois lifestyle. “I was so young,” he says. “That’s what you feel at that time.”