Thursday, April 11 2019 | 8PM Subway France 1985 d, Luc Besson with Isabelle Adjani, Christopher Lambert, Richard Bohringer, Michel Galabru, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Jean Bouise and Jean-Pierre Bacri. In French with English subtitles. Colour. 104 m
“Subway brings to mind Orson Welles’ quip about the cinema being the greatest electric train set a boy could have. Its director, Luc Besson, only 26, showed resourcefulness and a sense of filmmaking fun with his 1982 low-budget sci-fier Le Dernier Combat. For his second feature, Gaumont (distrib of Combat) gave him over 15 million francs, Christopher Lambert and Isabelle Adjani as stars, and let him go play in the Paris Metro.” Variety
“The film, with a scenario credited to five different writers, attempts a humor that mostly misfires, and is far more impressive for Mr. Besson’s visual ingenuity than for his philosophical pretensions. The underground settings remain steadily intriguing, even when their geography seems vague, and they do evolve into a genuinely self-contained universe. But the final effect is cold-blooded and remote, for all its ingenuity.” New York Times
See Also: Le Dernier Combat aka The Last Battle (Besson, 1984), Boy Meets Girl (Carax, 1984), Détective (Godard, 1985)