When you think “French filmmaker,” you probably don’t imagine Luc Besson. French filmmakers create lush, artistic masterpieces filmed at l’Heure Bleue and the ladies all smell like lavender and the craft services tables are laden with brie. Besson, by contrast, is deliriously vulgar: He likes car chases and gunfights and well-muscled heroes who overpower hordes of rampaging bad guys. More than anything, Besson likes strong women; and he’s never, ever boring.
Lucy (rated R), playing on three screens at my local multiplex thanks to a starring role by Scarlett Johansson, is less noteworthy for her contribution than for heralding Besson’s return to what he does best. As with La Femme Nikita (1990), The Professional (1994) and The Fifth Element (1997), the film makes little to no sense, clinging to a vague idea of a plot as a way of delivering a sensual onscreen experience. It’s blessedly bonkers – at once a perfect summer popcorn flick and the antidote to same. Man, it’s good to have him back.
The film takes about 90 seconds to rev into overdrive: Lucy (Johansson), an American student living in Taiwan, is coerced by a boyfriend to walk across the street and deliver a briefcase to a guy in a hotel. (Note to American students living abroad: Don’t ever agree to do that.) Before you know it, she’s waking up with an incision in her abdomen and preparing, against her will, to transport a rather large packet of a rather mysterious substance across the border.
When the packet bursts inside her, all hell breaks loose. The drug is designed to do … something, but in Lucy’s system it literally expands her mind: Humans, we’re told, are using only 10 percent of our brains’ capacities, but Lucy is suddenly jump-started to double that, and then triple, and so on. With each boost of capacity she acquires new powers and special senses – total mastery of her own body is easy, but controlling other people and sensing electrical patterns in the air will take half an hour at least.
The drug also turns Lucy from a panicky, frantic human being in the film’s earliest scenes into, well, the Scarlett Johansson we all know and love. The actress is typically affectless to the point of roboticism, a trait that serves her well as Lucy transcends human emotion and becomes something akin to a Cray supercomputer with an hourglass figure. (She does deliver one marvelous monologue, as Lucy, who’s just beginning to realize what’s happening, calls her mother and sums up a lifetime of memories in a burst of hyper-informed emotion.)
As she seeks help from an American scholar (Morgan Freeman) who happens to be hanging out in Paris, Besson throws in a few car chases and fight scenes for old time’s sake; but he’s more interested in blowing our minds with visual representations of Lucy’s metaphysical journey. Edging closer and closer to fulfilling 100 percent of her brain’s capacity, Lucy the character and Lucy the film become something very close to CGI-enhanced improv. There’s a very strong suspicion that Besson is making things up as he goes along, but I promise that over the course of the film’s oh-so-brief 89-minute runtime, you won’t mind a bit.
(IMAGE: Scarlett Johansson in Lucy. Photo courtesy of Universal Studios.)