---

French
Drama
Feature film
1983

---

I don't know about you, but I find French films to be very much alike -- French. That's not at all to say they're bad, but they have a quality to them that's very... French.

Luc Besson directed Le Dernier Combat, his first feature. He went on to direct Nikita and Leon (aka The Professional) among others. (Of interest, Le Dernier Combat also stars Jean Reno, the assassin in The Professional.) What exactly is Le Dernier Combat about? Hm. Well. Let me get back to that.

The story is set in a post-apocalyptic world where civilization has been thrown back so far that Man becomes Caveman, symbolically shown by the lack of ability to verbalize (there's exactly two words of dialog spoken twice in the whole film), cave paintings, hand-to-hand combat and a basic search for a mate. The black-and-white filming underscores the bleakness of this future.

At its essence, a Man cobbles together an airplane (which looks like an open-cockpit ultralight), and escapes his high-rise home in the middle of a desert. He lands in a dilapidated town, where he quickly has a run-in with the Brute. The Man manages to collapse in the haven of the Doctor, who also is the cave artist of the film. The Doctor patches the Man back up and the adversity of living and fending off the Brute form a bond between them. The Doctor eventually trusts the Man enough to reveal his greatest secret (and greatest asset), a woman.

But before the Doctor can bring the Man and the Woman together, the Brute breaks through the Doctor's defenses. The Doctor is killed in a freak storm, and the Man and the Brute battle it out mano a mano. The Man eventually triumphs, but only by taking on aspects of the Brute. When the Man rushes back to find the Woman, he discovers that the Brute has killed the Woman.

The Man gets his airplane running again and returns to the place from which he fled. There, he takes on aspects of the Brute, kills a local bully and finds his concubine.

So, back to what Le Dernier Combat is about. I'm not entirely certain. It seems to say that at the end, man will be reduced to basic instincts: eat; find shelter; be the strongest; mate. Given the world he created, there's not much I can argue about with that point. It's certainly interesting in the artistic aspects of the movie -- black and white, no dialog, the symbolism portrayed (and I'm certain I didn't catch them all).

So, at the very end of it, I don't feel like I wasted 90 minutes of my life, but I do feel like I'm missing the point. (Which, truth to tell, is more or less what I feel like after many French films.)