Further links to the old baroque are made when the Diva begins to sing the old opera song by Donizetti titled Lucia di Lammermoor. As the song progresses and becomes increasingly intense, so too do the visual shots. Change is portrayed in this sequence which begins with smooth transitional cuts of the diva. As the song becomes more “allegro” so to do the cuts become harsher. The first cut away from the diva is to Lilu (The Fifth Element) looking worried. The cuts become faster with the music and begin to show excessive shots of ugly space creatures killing people without concern, juxtaposed with shots of still, beautiful Lilu. Lilu throws the first punch at the same time as the first kick of the beat.
The introduction of the beat to the old, rhythm-less opera song is an important element. Rhythm has the ability to schematize a second. This comes back to the “baroque”
1.
problem that the once smallest unit of time exists no longer since we are able to break it
up into increasingly smaller units. Consider the shots of Lilu fighting the ugly, alien
creatures, her fighting movements are almost like dance movements to the music. Through this action she fragments “both movement and time into tiny units. When these movements are reunited into a total movement and time we notice that this does not restore continuity, but a linearity that leaves otherwise imperceptible gestures and instants distinct.” (p.53, Neo-Baroque: a sign of the times, Princeton UP, 1992).
As the beat continues the diva’s voice becomes almost electrified in an ironic collaboration of nature and technology in an attempt to progress the baroque into the future; as the villain of the movie says, “I know this music. Let’s change the beat.” which is exactly was done with Lucia di Lammermoor. Since it is the “baddy” of the story who says this, perhaps Besson is challenging the idea of a futuristic baroque. The film reflects today’s culture in that it is what today’s culture wants to see, however it is science fiction, and futuristic, and as such could be considered a warning, a kind of mild distopia which lingers in the future unless we change our ways.
In true Baroque style, Besson found where the boundaries were with opera music, and pushed them. Never has an opera song been paired with an electronic beat, perhaps this is because they would be appealing to fans of neither genre; opera lovers generally are not fans of electronic music, and lovers of electronic music generally do not listen to opera, there has never been a market for it. Whatever the reason, there has always been a boundary, which is broken by the collaboration of the musical genres in this film.
The sequence truly is a spectacle. However the audience does not simply view the spectacle, they are involved in it. They can hear for themselves, as if they were there at the opera house, the breaking of the boundaries through the musical genre collaboration. They can see for themselves the excessive violence that possibly threatens our future. They can see transvestite radio presenters and ugly, over-powering alien creatures, and the spectacle is no longer an objective image on a theatre screen, they are involved in the spectacle, in their own mind they have become a part of it.
Perhaps the only non baroque character in the film is Lilu. The audience sees the futuristic world through the eyes of an outsider, as Lilu does, and thus they can identify with her. Except that Lilu goes even further and looks at the present day as an outsider; she comes to learn about the great wars of the past and cries. Lilu represents perfection and seems to be opposed to some of the baroque ideas, it could then be said that, although this film could be described as neo-baroque, it does not support a baroque future.
Luc Besson's
baroque complexity (blade runner) - countless layers of elevated streets to cities, unfathomable scale of buildings and technology, multilayered cities teeming with people like ants.
Its fast and frenetic
Donizetti beautiful tunes and banal, doom-laden lyrics ('libretto') - Lucia di Lammermoor
“Excess describes the overcoming of a limit in terms of an exit from a closed system” – Calabrese
Excessive: Doesn’t just stretch border without breaking it but escapes border by breaking thru, crosses threshold by making opening.
