It should have been immediately clear to me that the trailer for the film I saw starring a young, callow
Scarlett Johansson who is forced out of circumstance to become a rather extraordinary force of nature was a film by none other than the French director
Luc Besson. After all, he has made his name making films that have more or less immortalised
Anne Parillaud in
La Femme Nikita (1990), a 12-year-old
Natalie Portman in
Léon: The Professional (1994),
Milla Jovovich in
The Fifth Element and now Johansson in
Lucy as female characters who transcend the ordinary.
While Lucy is not quite the classic like La Femme Nikita and Léon, it is still much more riveting than any old Hollywood action flick. Perhaps the secret lies in the fact that Besson made the film as pure self indulgence: he was fascinated by the idea that we may only be using a fraction of our brains (this notion is fairly mythical according to most neurologists today) and decided to make a film that would play out his fascination with the possibilities inherent in this premise.
We meet Lucy, Johansson’s character, just as she is duped by her good-for-nothing boyfriend Richard (Pilou Asbæk) into delivering a briefcase, contents unknown, to a Taiwanese gangster in Taipei. All manner of things must go wrong in order for Lucy to end up ingesting a large quantity of CPH4 – an experimental drug that has the extraordinary capacity to enhance human brain function when taken in large doses.
Throw science out the window as Lucy careens through Taipei and Paris, becoming more and more omniscient as well as scarily stronger, practically telekinetic really, in her search for answers to what she is becoming.
While this film maybe structured as a fairly conventional action thriller, including Lucy dodging the gangsters that initially forced her to carry the CPH4 – Besson is far more interested in the question of what really might happen if humans truly had the capacity to become godlike, and he pursues this question with almost no real regard to maintaining any semblance of a truly cohesive plotline.
Don’t let this put you off though. While Johansson has a few off moments, her onscreen persona is powerful, the visuals captivating, and the pseudo philosophy moving enough to keep you in your seat. It helps that Morgan Freeman and Amr Waked (from the wonderful Salmon Fishing in the Yemen) are part of a cast that just about manages to hold this crazy little film together.
If you are a fan of Luc Besson, you cannot miss Lucy. If this is the first time you’ve heard his name – what better way of being introduced to his oeuvre.
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