Fridae

As French cinema’s commercial wunderkind, Luc Besson’s debt to comics has always been present in the fast-paced, stylish action flicks that made him famous in the 80s and 90s, from the neo-noir of Leon and Nikita to the space opera of The Fifth Element. Never a particularly deep storyteller, his delivery of emotion and drama, however cheap, rarely misses a beat, and likewise his pacing, framing and editing are much owed in return to the efficient paneling and staging of the great comic books.

It seems only natural that at the end of the oughts, Besson’s biggest film in the director’s chair is a big budget fantasy adventure adapted from a French comic, Jacques Tardi’s The Adventures of Adele Blanc Sec. And when the film starts, you know you’re in Besson territory again indeed. In the early 20th century, a pterodactyl flies over Paris one fateful night and starts a chain reaction of events that lead to our heroine, Adele Blanc-Sec (literally meaning “Dry White”), a hot tempered and cynical headstrong Gallic cross between Lois Lane and Gertrude Bell, a reporter with a taste for high adventure, with the knack of finding herself in the strangest scrapes possible.

The film kicks into high gear we first see our heroine goes on a tomb raid in Egypt like a turn of the century Lara Croft and seeking out a centuries-old Mummy to take back to France, where she meets her rival, the evil Professor Dieuneveult (Mathieu Amalric under heavy prosthetic makeup, looking like a cross between Nosferatu and Toht from Raiders of the Lost Ark) and invents a daring escape on the level of any feat Indiana Jones has ever attempted. Evil Arabs, avaricious fellow Europeans, a headstrong heroine ahead of her time...it looks like we’re set for a corking good colonial adventure along the lines of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

What’s great about this film is that it is anything but that for the rest of the film.

Continuing its manically energetic storytelling pace, Besson instead cycles through a broadly-caricatured cross-section of turn of the century French society, veering in tone wildly between social satire and slapstick. Dimwitted politicians, incompetent cops, a nerdy Polish scientist, a socially clueless elderly genius, a pompous big game hunter, and even Adele herself, are all equal targets in Besson’s crude but effective mise-en-scene, for what he is doing here is transforming what was originally a high adventure title loaded with social commentary and touches of science fiction into a giddy and silly comics spoof of the epic action adventures that made him famous. He maintains his manic pacing and efficient comic-book staging, but to create a fast-paced action adventure where the truly exciting action setpieces and supernatural trappings are eventually rendered so ridiculous and inconsequential by the ensuing developments of the plot that the film is clearly thumbing its nose not just at Besson’s own work, but also at pompous Hollywood adventures like Stephen Sommers’ Mummy Trilogy and even Spielberg’s Indiana Jones quadrilogy, in which the heroes save the world from apocalyptic disasters from truly evil villains on a regular basis, a tradition that Besson turns on its head. By taking its deadly serious action sequences and welding them onto a plot that gets increasingly ridiculous and deliberately silly, Besson basically makes a comedy with a lot of action in it, but in which his skills as an action director in terms of timing and pacing actually make the comedy funnier. The film’s nicest pay off is how true to the English title, a Mummy does rise from the grave, but what happens afterwards is so drolly funny and sophisticatedly parodic of Hollywood clichés even while it emulates them, that it’s a wonder that it worked at all, inviting laughs of genuine amusement rather than derision.

When so many of Hollywood’s own comic book blockbusters are unintentionally funny to begin with in their overt seriousness and desire to please, it’s nice to see an adaptation that so deliberately and successfully misadapts a high adventure comic book into a sometimes crude and often knowing parody of big budget action adventures itself, while cast as a big budget action adventure. Megamind is the crowd-pleasing genre spoof this week, but Adele offers its own, far more sophisticated laughs for those willing to seek it.

A shame that the version seen by this reviewer was dubbed in English rather inconsistently, it always sounds better in French.