Subway (1985) - film review

Helena, the beautiful young wife of a wealthy businessman, invites a stranger Fred to her party.  Fred repays her by stealing compromising documents from her husband’s safe, with the aim of blackmailing the couple.  Pursued by police and the henchmen of Helena’s ruthless husband, Fred goes on the run, taking refuge in the Paris metro. Here, he meets other social misfits, including a roller-blader the police have been hunting for several months.  Whilst Helena realises that she has fallen in love with Fred and makes every attempt to contact him, Fred occupies himself with forming a band by recruiting buskers.  Meanwhile, the police and Helena’s husband are getting closer to their target...

Subway was the film that brought fame and international notoriety to French film director Luc Besson.  It is a psychedelic, electrically charged excursion into 1980s punk surrealism, echoing the style, if not the substance, of Beineix’s hugely popular 1981 thriller Diva.

Although thin on plot (indeed what little plot there is seems only to spoil the film), Subway is a stunning cinematographic experience.  It offers a gruelling visual feast which hooks the spectator from the start (which includes a spectacular car chase across Paris).   The scenes in the metro are captured with an artistic brilliance, providing the film with its most memorable moments, sometimes highly comical, sometimes deeply disturbing.

This is a film which tackles conventional films from a most unconventional perspective.  As in much of Besson’s cinema, the story is the least important ingredient of the film.  What matters most is how that story is conveyed, and Bresson’s focus is, as ever, the visual side, exploiting to the full the most powerful side of the cinematic medium.

This is a tale about exclusion and rebellion, about freeing yourself from the chains of conformity and attaining self-fulfilment.  This is reflected clearly in the lead characters Fred and Helena, but it can also be seen in the increasingly desperate behaviour of the police chiefs who are hunting Fred.  Despite its quirky surface impression, Subway is actually quite an intelligent film, which says a surprising amount about human nature.

As with many of Besson’s subsequent films, Subway was decried by the critics but proved to be hugely popular at the box office.  The film not only defined Besson’s unique style of film-making but also crystallised our view of Besson as the rebel who would not allow conformity to compromise his outlandish artistic principles.

© James Travers 2000


Subway, Luc Besson’s second feature film, was a huge hit at the box office. Why then, is it so unpopular with highbrow critics.  Subway, they claim, has ’more syle than substance’ (Halliwell’s 2003) and has absolutely nothing of interest to say.  But Besson himself claimed, after making his very first short, "It was then I realised, if you have nothing to say, then don’t say it".

Is it not the craziness, the absence of pain, of feeling, or of obvious care that makes this film one of the greats?  Besson tends to focus on people whom we wouldn’t normally notice, or care about, and demonstrates our apathy towards people on the edge of society.  In 2007, Cédric Klapisch used similar techniques to demonstrate the same kind of themes in his film Paris, which was called ’captivating’ by Empire.

The visual perfection in Besson’s films, and Subway in particular, allows us to realise that it is not the story that matters, it is the way the story is told that makes the real difference.  So I say this to critics everywhere: watch Subway again, and this time see if you can see where Besson is coming from.  You really could not be more wrong if you tried.

© Guy Incognito (England) 2011 

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