Square One: Luc Besson’s The Last Battle (1983)

Whenever a filmmaker of note premieres a new film, it’s a good time to revisit that director’s first film to gauge how far they’ve come as an artist. With Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets currently in theaters, we take a look back at Luc Besson’s The Last Battle.
In a recent interview with Vulture, Luc Besson shared his preference for crafting cinematic worlds that are utopian, with the reportedly mind-boggling megalopolis of his forthcoming Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets being, in his words, like the “United Nations.” Put another way, it sounds like Valerian is—at face value, anyway—completely different from Besson’s first film.
Whereas his new movie is supposed to be lavish and lovely, his debut, The Last Battle, is stripped down and savage, shot in scrappy black-and-white instead of in the effects-laden digital that brought his latest to polychromatic life. Such austerity extends to the The Last Battle’s central conceit: There is almost no dialogue in this film, with the narrative justification being that, at some point in the future, people have inexplicably lost the ability to speak. Similarly, most of the film’s soundtrack is occupied by ambient noise, and when characters do cross paths, they communicate by way of grunting, pointing or fighting, which, in the film’s eat-or-be-eaten world of scavengers prowling through civilization’s ruins in search of food and shelter, are generally sufficient for getting one’s point across.
The decision to remove dialogue has both practical and aesthetic benefits, with the former perhaps being the more obvious. Not having to account for the human voice expedites sound mixing, something a young, probably cash-strapped filmmaker like Besson (he was only 24 when the film hit theaters) would certainly have appreciated. Excising dialogue also limits the movie in a way that is productive for creativity, because, just as restrictions in meter and line count compel sonneteers to think up imaginative ways of getting their points across, so does cutting out speech from The Last Battle force Besson to find other, more unorthodox means of non-verbal, narrative exposition. What results feels a bit like code-breaking (we have to work to decipher characters’ thoughts and emotions, though the film’s relatively conventional structure and the characters’ un-complex motivations still make The Last Battle fairly easy to follow) but also like we’re watching a wildlife documentary in which the fight for survival seems, in the absence of language, totally primordial.
The association between humans and animals is not accidental. Initially, the film’s wordlessness operates like a gimmick, a formal crutch imposed just so that it can be overcome, but as the movie progresses, the loss of language comes to signify a larger loss of culture and humanity. This thematic thread enters the picture in the form of an old doctor (Jean Bouise) who, cooped up in an abandoned apartment complex, has managed to salvage aspects of civilization as we currently know it: medicine, etiquette, art. Against him the film pits a brutish wanderer (Jean Reno) who frequents the doctor’s front gate, threatening his comfortable lifestyle. Between these two opposites resides the film’s protagonist (Pierre Jolivet), who, having been injured, is taken in by the old doctor and given a taste of life beyond survival. Since the start of the movie, our hero has occupied a space between the old world order and the new non-order (he kills to get what he needs but is also technologically savvy enough to build an airplane), a position of liminality that perhaps made him the ideal student for the old man’s cultural instruction.