Daniel K Gray reviews director Luc Besson's The Extraordinary Adventures Of Adele Blanc-Sec.
If an international audience was to be told they were about to see a film involving an irascible archaeologist uncovering secrets under the Egyptian sands, menaced by rivals and duplicitous locals and trying to beat deadly puzzles designed to thwart tomb raiders, their thoughts might well turn to Indiana Jones as he first raided his lost ark. If you revealed the hero was a heroine, you might tilt towards Lara Croft. However now there’s a new heroine on the block and her name is Adele Blanc-Sec, as resourceful as any of her peers and with a wit and demeanour as dry as her name-sake.
Luc Besson, as discussed elsewhere in this issue - is no stranger to strong female characters and here he gives his own adaptation of the classic French comic-strip heroine created by Jacques Tardis and set in the first years of the Twentieth Century. Actually a journalist rather than a full time tomb explorer, Adele (a fantastic debut from actress Louise Bourgoin) is a character constantly in search of adventure and a cure for her twin sister, almost lobotomised in a freak accident. Adele is in Egypt as part of a plan she has hatched with Professor Espérandieu, who has discovered a way to revive the dead. Unfortunately, while Adele is grabbing a mummy and in the Nile, Espérandieu is in a denial of his own with local Parisian authorities, having reanimated a giant pterodactyl from the local museum. The ancient bird has gone on a rampage and the Professor is sentenced to a firing squad. Can Adele save him so he can reanimate an ancient Pharaoh’s doctor to save her sister? If that sounds complicated, you haven’t even begun…
Here, as with many European films, the emphasis is on a sense of the bizarre and a ensemble of characters that are peculiar and endearing or grotesques and absurd. At any time the film may veer off into creative cul-de-sacs, meandering through its narrative with no sense of urgency and at other moments propelling itself at top speed.
It’s not so much a fault as simply a stylistic choice and here Besson indulges himself, cherry-picking elements from a range of Blanc-Sec’s printed adventures to fit into one long mini-epic and fully utilising a range of Parisian and Egyptian locations.
The changes of pace my be off-putting for British audiences - as we switch from slapstick action to pathos to walking, talking wise-cracking corpses dressed in bowler hats and Adele in a range of extreme disguises trying to affect a jail-break. Apart from some brief nudity, utterly inoffensive but perhaps equally unexpected, this could easily be a film marketed to much younger audiences, though one suspects they’d prefer something more brisk. That been said, there’s much to enjoy here and if you’re familiar with Besson’s occasional forays into the magical coupled with the surreal tone of other films such as Amelie or the recent Mic-Macs, then this is a flawed gem that is easy on the eye, stimulates the imagination and should tickle your funny bone. With its peculiar mix of a number of genres and sense of urban fantasy, perhaps the only word to truly describe the film is, well… ‘French’. Tres bien.
8/10
DANIEL K GRAY
