Den sidste kamp
I am continuing down the road of mystifying
movies. Interesting visually, but difficult to decode what is going on. “Le
Dernier Combat” (“The Last Battle”) is a fascinating watch, but I am still,
hours after finishing it, wondering what story it is trying to tell. Or indeed
what it is I was looking at.
The movie clearly takes place in a post-apocalyptic
world. People are few and largely scavengers. All the trappings of civilization
are broken and crumbling. Its black and white scenography looks like “Fallout”
in grey-tones. We are following a man, identified
in the titles as “The Man” (Pierre Jolivet), who is scavenging to make or fix a
small aircraft. In his encounters with other scavengers, we learn that spoken language
is non-existent, but we never learn why. The Man escapes a violent clash with
the scavengers in his plane and crash lands in a town. This unnamed town is
populated by only three other people. There is “The Doctor” (Jean Bouise) in an
abandoned hospital, “The Brute” (Jean Reno), a man who wants to get into the
hospital and an unnamed and unseen woman held in a room at the hospital by the
doctor.
The Man gets into a fight with The Brute,
and, injured, seeks shelter in the hospital. The Doctor and The Man become
friends, which lasts until The Brute gain entrance and go on a murdering rampage
in the hospital.
This was Luc Besson’s first feature movie
and as always with his movies, it is visually interesting. The post-apocalyptic
world is bleak and frightening and although the actors are just going around in
old ruins with a lot of garbage, it carries the sense of places suddenly left
year earlier. There is dust everywhere and everything is broken and torn. Literally
everything.
The problems I have with the “Le Dernier
Combat” come primarily from the narrative. I do not understand what these
people want or why they are doing what they are doing. The Man wants to fly, but
why and where to? The Brute wants to enter the hospital with an almost childish
glee, but why? What is there that he wants so bad? When he finally gets there,
the only thing he seems to do there is to kill. The Doctor keeps a girl in a
cell. Why? And who is she? Why is it speech has disappeared? We get no answers
to any of these questions.
I end up suspecting that Luc Besson had
this idea of a post-apocalyptic world where speech had disappeared and went big
time into the world building. Then, because after all this is a movie, he
needed the characters to do something, anything, but without caring too much
about what they actually did.
Later I had the thought that “Le Dernier
Combat” works well as a companion movie to the 1981 movie “Le Guerre de feu” (“Quest
for fire”). That one takes place before civilization, while “Le Dernier Combat”
takes place after civilization. In both cases language is gone, people are
hunter-gatherers, encounters at violent or friendly, nothing in between and
humanity is reduced to basics. The Doctor’s cave paintings in the hospital is a
massive hint in that direction. Again, the narrative is less important, it is
the picture of the world that matters.
A definite upside was to see a young Jean
Reno. Even in less good movies, Reno is always able to make the movie worthy of
watching. Just strange to see him here as the villain. A slightly comic
villain?
On the decidedly negative was the strange
soundtrack. Not that the music was bad, but it belonged to a VERY different
kind of movie. In this context it was somewhere between comic and confusing.
As a tableau “Le Dernier Combat” is spectacular,
thought provoking and worth watching. As a story, and indeed as a movie, I
consider it flawed and I am therefore hesitant to recommend it.
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