Subway (1985)

Luc Besson's Subway arrives from 1985, a decade before the cultural machinery that now governs our cinema would even be assembled, and it shows. A safecracker named Fred, dressed in a stolen tuxedo, flees into the Paris Metro and discovers a subterranean colony of eccentrics: roller-skating thieves, a strongman, a flower seller, a fledgling band. The film belongs to the cinema du look, which is a polite way of saying it cares about lighting, movement, and the shape of Isabelle Adjani's silhouette, and very little else.

For all its bohemian posturing, the film carries almost no social consciousness in the contemporary sense. The underground society is entirely white and entirely straight, and nobody in the frame seems to notice or care. Helena defies her wealthy husband and insults a magistrate's dinner party, which reads as the wilful glamour of a femme fatale, not a feminist argument. The rich exist as foils, the husband and his tuxedoed thugs, but the film's rejection of the surface world is a mood of refusal, a shrug from below decks. It romanticizes outsiders without proposing anything to do about the order they are fleeing. No environmental anxiety, no reckoning with race, no interest in bodies or minds that deviate from the standard issue.

The opening titles offer three philosophical quotations, Socrates, Sartre, and Sinatra, and gesture toward freedom from social responsibility. It is a thesis delivered with a wink and then abandoned. Nothing here lectures, nothing instructs, nothing asks the audience to reconsider its politics. The residue is a stylish, hollow pleasure: a punk band playing in a metro station while the hero bleeds happily on the floor. On the ledger of progressive virtue, this is a very thin vintage indeed.