In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we look at several music videos by Luc Besson.
Luc Besson has made many music videos, in between some of his films, but for the scope of the article I will focus on four of them, that all feel close to his single-minded oeuvre. As all of these music videos I am focusing on, in some ways connect thematically to his films, sometimes overtly so. In Luc Besson's films, there is a focus on women as heroes, who evolve in the process of becoming the heroïne. This often violent evolution inspires the world in turn, to change as well. It's in The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, Angel-A, Lucy, The Fifth Element, even the film he made about An Sang Suu Kyi (The Lady) and more. It is an undercurrent in most of these music videos, as well.
I should mention that Besson's relationship with women has been volatile, though. He came into hot water during the French Me Too-wave, for his violent and questionable behaviour and relationships on and off-set. I won't go into the whys and hows in this article, proper, (Google is your friend), but given that these are women-centric stories, and music videos that put women on a pedestal, I also feel that I should mention the other side of the coin, lest I give the idea that Besson is a good guy feminist.
The first music video I want to focus on is Isabelle Adjani's Pull Marine (see below), a song written by famed French songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, for whom Besson later directed a deliciously homo-erotic video for Mon Legionnaire (more about that one later). In it, Isabelle Adjani is the subject of an amour fou (a craze relationship) with overt nautical subtexts. This brings to focus two of the other themes Besson is a big fan of: mismatched partners, where the guy is often a straight talking, straight shooting everyman, and the woman is a kooky 'born sexy yesterday'/ 'manic pixie dream girl'-type (even if the second of those terms should be rejected to the trope bin). See, for examples of those Angel-A, Lucy, The Fifth Element and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. The frantic love in Besson's work is only his third favorite trope tho, after the evolving heroïne, and his love for water. Here, like in The Big Blue, Valerian and the City of Thousand Planets and many more of his films, water is a force of life and love, where the degradation of the relationship is symbolized by a flooding.
Mylene Farmer's Que mon cœur lâche (also below) is even more connected to Luc Besson's cinematic works, in that he later basically remade the story as Angel-A. In both an angel is sent to earth and learns the hard way how brutal and criminal life can be, both also experiences love and sex. In the case of Angel-A this is all in beautiful monochrome black and white, with a concise and fairly linear story. Que mon cœur lâche on the other hand is drenched in eighties-style neon, has a fairly muddled and hard-to-understand story, and even makes time for a few homo-erotic dance-breaks, something that the video shares with Besson's music video for Serge Gainsbourg's Mon Legionnaire. Even though I won't dwell too much on that one, as it does not necessarily fit with my thesis that Besson's like his evolutionary revolutionary leading ladies, there is a stark gender-blindness in that video when it comes to the use of the male gaze. There the camera lusts at the male dancers, something that that video shares with Que mon cœur lâche.
The women in Luc Besson's cinematic output often have the ability to bend the world to their will, even if it is more metaphor than text. But in films like Lucy and Angel-A that subtext does indeed become very literal, as does it in Madonna's Love Profusion (also below). In it, Madonna struts through the streets like it's a catwalk, the power of her walk turning the world into a nautical paradise, where flowers bend over backwards for her, after blooming in her wake. The flower and nautical imagery feels very Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, or like something out of Arthur and the Minimoys, the other project Besson did with Madonna.
The only true music video tie-in Besson made for a feature is for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Valerian-star Cara Delevingne sings a track called I Feel Everything (finally below), and in the video she is seen in a Lucy-esque void, first singing in front of the lyrics in a bold black typeface. The world here, and Cara Delevigne herself eventually evolves, morphing into different wigs, suits, and interacting with Flubber-like liquid and purple butterflies. It's sparse yet maximalist and oh-so-very Besson. It's the clearest execution of what I consider this throughline of ever-changing women as a force of nature, evolving from the 'fickle' amour fou of Isabelle Adjani's Pull Marine to the prime example of a world that is fully in reverence to its central star in I Feel Everything. The void-like world here is only there to support the starlet, changing with her needs. You can't get more Besson than that.