While the movie spends a little too long setting up its world, it’s hard to complain when everything is so interesting.
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Then there’s Besson, trying to honor his teenage self with a story of a cab driver and supreme being saving the universe through love. But Jovovich's performance shines through the tropes the best she can. Leelo is the quintessential trope of giving a fully grown, fully sexualized woman a childlike sense without even being able to communicate.
It's part of where having a 16-year-old's movie come to life gets shaky. You could just feel this incredible energy.” She has said that when she first appeared in the bandage dress on set, there was “a hush, which is really bizarre when you think that there's over 200 people around you, and everything is deathly quiet. There’s Jovovich, only 19, in her first sci-fi movie. Watching The Fifth Element now really speaks to that dance. Gary Oldman's outfit and Southern accent also manage to do a fair bit of scene-stealing. Looking back on the experience for Vogue, he said, “I love the collaborations in the movies or dance as they are a bit of a fresh air for me I try to do Gaultier, but in the service of the story and the director.” Leeloo’s bandage dress, Ruby Rhod’s endless leopard print that supposedly drove Prince away from taking the role, Korben Dallas’ colored undershirts, the Day-Glo medical wear seen in Leeloo’s early captivity, and even the surprisingly sexy outfits at McDonald’s - no role was too small for Gaultier. For a thousand costumes, he may have even done 5,000 sketches before narrowing it down.” It’s an incredible amount of work people don’t even know about. “A thousand costumes is like 10 collections but all for one movie. Thierry-Maxime Loriot of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, which in 2011 offered a retrospective on Gaultier’s work, said as much.
The Fifth Element might as well be his masterpiece. Inspired by the disheveled looks of his aging grandmother, as well as a blurring of gender identity, Gaultier created clothes that seemed to be rooted in an imagined past and looked towards an even more imagined future. Getty Images/Hulton Archive/Getty Imagesīy 1990, Madonna was asking Gaultier to personally design clothes for her world tours, to which he offered up a retro-futuristic cone bra. Gaultier replied, "I am not serious because, maybe, life is not serious."īruce Willis stars as Korben Dallas. “Is this cross-dressing, tailored-not-to-fit style a sort of fashion through the looking glass, a Dickensian carnival - or serious clothes?” the Washington Post asked in 1984. Gaultier, who in 1980 started out designing women’s clothes out of trash bags, had a reputation for turning conventions on their head, and then turning that into something nobody had ever seen before. ”He knows the color, he knows the flavor of New York.” ”I wanted the best and that is Jean-Paul,” Besson said in 1997. Just as Besson saw flying taxis as the future of transportation, he saw Gaultier as the only person who could express what the future of New York fashion would look like. Then Besson made the contact that would cement The Fifth Element’s legacy: designer Jean Paul Gaultier.
Inspired by the work of French comic creators Pierre Christin and artist Jean-Claude Mézières, Besson contacted the two for ideas about the future of New York, with a heavy emphasis on flying taxis.