Le Dernier combat (1983) - film review

After a global nuclear catastrophe, all trace of civilisation is reduced to ruins.  Pollution in the atmosphere has robbed man of his power of speech, and mankind is reduced to eking out a pitiful existence amidst the debris.  One man manages to escape from a band of marauders in a wasteland by patching up an aeroplane.  He lands in what remains of a former city, where he encounters a homicidal brute.  He is able to fend off the brute with help from a doctor, who lives alone in what was once a hospital.  The doctor has a secret, however.  He is keeping a woman prisoner in his cellar...

Luc Besson’s first full-length film is this extraordinarily bizarre yet stunningly realised post-apocalyptic drama which demands at least three viewings to make sense of it.  Filmed in black and white with just two lines of dialogue, Le Dernier combat appears quite different to Besson’s later films (for one thing, it is far more tongue-in-cheek), yet it amply demonstrates the young director’s talent and his preoccupation with visual style.  It earned Besson a brace of awards and launched his very successful film-making career.

The film is a re-working of a short film which Besson made a few years earlier (L’Avant dernier).  A puzzling yet compelling work, it offers a strangely powerful study of human nature.  The lack of dialogue allows the spectator to draw his own conclusions (and to some extent make up his or her own film), something which adds greatly to the film’s appeal.  Some brilliant comic touches lift the film in just the right places and there is a humanity which is curiously lacking in Besson’s subsequent films.

The main character in the film is played by Pierre Jolivet, a personal friend of Besson who would later pursue a promising film-making career himself  (creating such works as the baffling sci-fi thiller Simple mortel.)  Jean Reno also stars in the film, long before he became an international cult figure.  Here, he plays (not surprisingly) the villainous hard-man of the piece, a psychopathic killer whose thwarted attempts to carry out his job make him far more endearing than frightening.

© James Travers 2003

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