Subway (1985)
Is the cinéma du look still worth a viewing?
Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal about the teenager you once were, to the teenager on your sofa? Forewarned is forearmed…
Elevator pitch
Petty criminal Fred (Christophe Lambert) attends the birthday party of Héléna Kerman (Isabelle Adjani), where he steals a folder of documents from her gangster husband. Pursued by the mob and les flics he flees into the Paris Metro, and discovers an underground world. He begins to blackmail Héléna as an excuse to get close to her, even as he whiles away his time putting together a band with all the gypsies, tramps and thieves he befriends in the subway.
Subway opens with a high speed car chase through the centre of Paris (Christophe Lambert is driving a dinky little Peugeot 205) set to a pounding rock score, until the tape Lambert is listening to gets chewed up by the car stereo. As an opening scene, it is, as it should be, a perfect introduction not only to the story but to the tone and approach of the movie.
Subway was a key film in the ‘80s cinéma du look trend of style over substance, and although almost all of it takes place underground, it's almost all surface. But that doesn’t mean there is nothing going on. Like the nouvelle vague French films of the ‘60s, Subway seems to be taking the tropes of Hollywood pulp movies and passing them through a distinctly Gallic vision to create something entirely new. But where something like Godard’s 1960 À Bout de Souffle took film noir and reinvented it through a hand-held dive into the Parisian demi-monde, Subway has an altogether more ‘80s sensibility. It takes the deadbeat cool of late New Hollywood thrillers like Walter Hill’s 1978 Driver (also starring Isabelle Adjani) and shoots it like a cigarette commercial, but with a persistent European quirk.
The key image of the movie (the cover, indeed, of the soundtrack LP, which I still, regrettably, own), is Christophe Lambert, his hair a bleached blonde halo round his magnificently sullen face, dressed in a tux, coming out of a steam-filled corridor, carrying a portable neon light. It is an image of ridiculous, fantastical cool, which is immediately undercut by the fact that the floor then gives way beneath him and he drops his futurist lamp into a pool of sewage.
As with the opening car chase, Subway is constantly undercutting its extravagant cool as if to reassert an independent identity: the French can be cool, it insists, but not in the same way as the Americans. That sequence with the fluorescent light happens as Lambert’s Fred is beginning to explore his new home. He descends from the ‘70s tiles of the Metro, through the ‘50s brown and cream municipal paint of the administrative corridors, and down into the naked concrete and pipework of the deep service tunnels. It is there, beneath the acreted decoration of culture, that he finds a multi-ethnic, fraternal, egalitarian France; made free by its lack of purpose, made cool by its lack of effort, a revolt into style.
Can we show the kids?
Amazingly for a French film there’s no sex, no nudity and very little violence. On the other hand, it’s hard to know what a twenty-first century child might make of such a determinedly ‘80s artefact, and a French one at that.
Delights
As you would expect from a film obsessed with appearances above all, the casting is terrific. It’s not just the cinematic charisma of Christophe Lambert and Isabella Adjani, but the rumpled, world-weary Michele Galabru as the police inspector, the wary charm of Richard Bohringer and the ineffably French fizzog of Jean Reno as an inscrutably monosyllabic drummer.
It is also a delightful reminder of a European ‘80s that was defiantly distinct from the Hollywood ‘80s that has seared itself into our collective memories. This is the ‘80s of ZTT releases of obscure German electronica, Swatch watches and Fido Dido, and it's lovely to see it again.
Discomforts
But not so lovely to hear it. The French may be superb at symbolist classical music, cafe jazz and chanson, but they are terrible at pop. Or they were in the ‘80s (I have a considerable weakness for yé-yé). The music in Subway is terrible. Just terrible. I still don’t understand why I not only bought the soundtrack LP but played it to the extent that I am still word-perfect on the horrendous English language lyrics nearly forty years later.
The cast is almost entirely male. Apart from Adjani only three other women actors get speaking parts and two of them are at a bourgeois dinner party where Adjani’s character insults them all.
More seriously, while director Luc Besson has been cleared of raping a woman he had a relationship with, other women came forward with accusations of inappropriate behaviour during the investigation. Uncomfortably, he has claimed that his film Léon about a hitman (Jean Reno) who forms a relationship with a 12 year old girl (Natalie Portman) was inspired by his own relationship with his second wife, who was 16 when he married her (when he was 31).
Is it as good as you remember?
Well, no.
As evidenced by the fact that I own the soundtrack LP, I loved this film in 1985, but as also evidenced by the fact that I had to buy the soundtrack LP, this was 1985 and there was no way I was ever going to be able to watch the film again. Not until it came out on VHS. And even then, as a French language film, it was hard to find. All I had to remember it by were the indelible mise en scene. The images, the style, the cool. That, and Eric Serra’s execrable songs.
But that was the purpose of the cinéma du look; to move away from the cinéma vérité of the nouvelle vague, to create something more stylised and cinematic. Even if it said nothing, it said it with a style and verve that stuck in the mind and captured the imagination.
It still distinguished itself from the American equivalent, however. The two main transport cops may be called Batman and Robin but they are ineffectual, chain-smoking idiots who can’t even get their walkie-talkies to work. In a Hollywood film, the nervous young roller-skating thief Fred befriends would be redeemed to play a minor heroic role, but here he remains a petty thief who preys on the weak and betrays his friends. All the characters remain off-kilter and equivocal, a weird parade of misfits and loners.
And perhaps this revolution in style succeeded. You could imagine a re-make of Subway - all low life eccentrics and small time crooks - by Tarantino. Although he’d write a better script and have much better music. It has its shadows and echoes in the work of American film-makers like Jim Jarmusch and the Coen Brothers. And surely Wes Anderson is a proponent of the cinéma du look, par excellence?
Like many of these American indie films it feels like a quintessentially Gen X product - not made by us, perhaps, but made for us, for those media-literate, design-minded members of the quotation generation. A film that says nothing is a film that can be read into, a text purely for interpretation, a signifier with no significance. The perfect material, in fact, for a Substack newsletter devoted to taking apparently meaningless pulp culture entirely too seriously.
For more dorky French cool, try Jean-Michel Jarre:
1976: Pop Muzak
Strange how potent cheap music can be. Like a whiff of Blue Stratos on the night air, all it takes is a few bars and there we are, forty years ago, dripping extruded ice cream product on the vinyl seats of a Morris Marina while the rain falls on a pebbled beach. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.