The Limits of Luc Besson’s ‘Made-in-France’ Blockbusters: From the Transnational to the Postnational in Valerian and Anna

Abstract

By creating EuropaCorp in 2000, Luc Besson provided an alternative model to Hollywood studio cinema that could compete in the globalised markets of the new millennium. The chapter discusses how his latest productions, Valerian and the City of the Thousand Planets (Besson, 2017) and Anna (Besson, 2019), French films shot in English with non-French casts, try to renegotiate transnational and postnational features but fail to consolidate his model of global popular filmmaking made in France. It argues that after the global success of Lucy (Besson, 2014) had revived the potential of the EuropaCorp transnational production model, Valerian and Anna have shown the limits of Besson’s brand and filmmaking methods. It also identifies reasons behind their mixed reception and links their disappointing results to the implosion of EuropaCorp in 2020.

With their European film major EuropaCorp, Luc Besson and Pierre-Ange Le Pogam constructed, between 2000 and 2010, an innovative model and viable alternative to the Hollywood studios.¹ They built their trademark around big-budget films—in the European context—designed for the increasingly globalised markets and cultures of the twenty-first century, while EuropaCorp also backed and distributed smaller films aimed at more modest French audiences. After 2011, the corporation’s strategic priorities changed dramatically, its growth exposing the potential and limits of its internationalisation strategies. The group increasingly focused on blockbusters in English with international casts and, despite commercial successes, repeatedly showed signs of financial difficulties.² Negative results between 2015 and 2019 led to the sale of subsidiaries and scaling down of assets from 2016. After aborted negotiations with Netflix and Pathé in 2019, the US-fund Vine Alternative Investments took control of EuropaCorp in February 2020, with Luc Besson just retaining an honorary administrative role and some shares in the company.³

This chapter examines how Besson’s ambitions, especially with his own filmmaking ventures, were instrumental in the difficulties encountered by EuropaCorp after 2012. It briefly retraces significant challenges, before focusing on the last two films Besson released after the global success of Lucy (Besson, 2014): Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (Besson, 2017), a space-opera with a record budget for European cinema and global blockbuster aspirations; and Anna (Besson, 2019), a mid-budget action movie featuring a young Russian female hitwoman recalling Nikita (Besson, 1990). Valerian and Anna are French majority productions, partly financed by pre-sales to minimise financial risk, shot in English with international casts and Besson’s arsenal of experienced French technical personnel. Both films exemplify the popular strand of French cinema targeting wide global audiences. Yet their production and exhibition strategic plans seem to disregard important signals sent by the film industry after 2015. Though both sought in different ways to balance corporate commercial concerns and their own modes of differentiation, they confirmed the volatility of the film markets and highlighted flaws in the group’s business strategies.

The chapter draws on recent cultural studies definitions of ‘transnational’ and ‘postnational’ cinema to assess how the two films negotiate Besson’s tested production models and the mutations in the consumption of global blockbusters after 2015. Recent studies (Le Guilcher 2016; Michael 2019; Delon and Vinuela 2020) have explored the evolution of the vertical integration model of EuropaCorp and the development of its international model of production and distribution under Besson’s leadership. Building on Fanny Beuré’s research on the group’s evolution after 2011 (Beuré 2020) and Christopher Meir’s analysis of questionable expansion decisions made in that period (Meir 2020), the chapter highlights the limits of hybrid formatting and corporate image differentiation in the pre-pandemic globalised film industry. It also evaluates the impact of new platforms on cinematic spectacle and the consequences of inflated promotional budgets. Finally, regarding Besson’s demise after 2019, it considers the fragility of personal success and professional reputation in the age of global culture and news circulation.

Critical Contexts and Cultural Settings

Before focusing on how Besson’s recent films illustrate transnational popular trends, it is useful to briefly revisit the theoretical groundings of ‘cinematic transnationalism’ and ‘cosmopolitan cinema’, linking them to the globalised filmmaking patterns governing the group’s production model and, specifically, Besson’s filmmaking. For years, he was the driving force behind the group’s international strategic development with a direct impact on French film exports (Beuré 2020, 90–94). The income generated for the national film industry has often been underestimated by Besson’s critics, who despised EuropaCorp’s popular success. In this context, the notion of ‘high concept’ helps to define expensive projects produced by EuropaCorp with the global market in mind. ‘High concept’ film has been theorised in the context of Hollywood (Wyatt 1994; Isaacs 2011). It is less used in the context of French film production, where it refers to a strong but simple main premise, the identification of an effective pitch, fast-paced, spectacular action and/or special effects (Pillard 2020, 189).

When it comes to the circulation of cultural products, using ‘international’ or ‘global’ to describe a film, a director or a production process is problematic in the current context of globalisation. For example, in World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, ‘international’ when applied to film tends to indicate ‘a parity relation between nations’ (Durovičová and Newman 2010, ii), while ‘global’, as used by Beuré (2020, 89) to describe blockbusters, implies a totalising logic of film culture. However, the term ‘transnational’, when applied to cinema, suggests ‘uneven exchanges’ between cultures and nations (Durovičová and Newman 2010, ix–xi). Valerian, with its €197 million budget, its assumed universal generic typology and its global marketing campaign, deploys many of the components and ambitions attached to superproductions aspiring to global blockbuster status. Discussing twentieth-century cinema, Vanessa Schwartz (2007, 6) associates global culture with ‘an idiom through which an additional identity is formed, one whose every definition is based on the knowledge that it is simultaneously consumed around the world’. The conditions for this ‘additional identity’ were met for Lucy, but for reasons addressed below, Valerian possibly was too heterogeneous for worldwide consumption (especially in the USA).

Internationalisation processes raise other terminological issues. In French, ‘international’ is preferred (see Delon and Vinuela 2020; Beuré 2020). ‘Postnational’ seems to be used less frequently than ‘transnational’ in Anglo-American film studies and research since 2000.⁴ In addition, neither term seems to appear as prominently in Francophone film academic writing, and when employed, they tend to be used rather indiscriminately. Therefore, precise definitions are needed to address the cultural differentiation found in Besson/EuropaCorp’s productions, especially after 2011, in changing contexts of film circulation and consumption. Ezra and Rowden (2006, 1) have defined as transnational the ‘global forces that link people or institutions across nations’. More recently, Mette Hjort (2010, 15) has grounded her typology of ‘cinematic transnationalism’ in ‘resistance to globalization as cultural homogenization and a commitment to ensuring that certain economic realities associated with filmmaking do not eclipse the pursuit of aesthetic, artistic, social, and political values’. She addresses several transnational modes directly relevant to the two films discussed in this chapter that can be summarised as follows: ‘milieu-building transnationalism’ is based on collaboration as resistance to purely economic constraints; ‘opportunistic transnationalism’ envisages financial imperatives as the priority dictating partners or responding to opportunities arising; ‘globalising transnationalism’ is a response to inadequacy of national sources of finance, including the premise of high cost to attract wide audience and recuperation through broad audience appeal; ‘auteurist transnationalism’ connects the director’s identity and collaborations beyond national borders; ‘modernising transnationalism’ links cultures across nations engaging with the modernisation of society by forging connections; and ‘experimental transnationalism’ resorts to unconventional practices to increase transnational appeal (Hjort 2010, 16–28). These ‘transnational modes’ can, with varying degrees, be related to EuropaCorp’s production practices. Besson’s filmmaking exemplifies Hjort’s modes of transnationalism through the adoption of a range of global visual style codes and techniques. As a producer, too, his constant renegotiation of business strategies to maximise global positioning in a fast-changing film industry is a form of ‘globalising transnationalism’. Additionally, by actively exploiting the French cultural exception to his advantage, including subsidies and tax-shelter mechanisms, he practises an ‘opportunistic transnationalism’ that has direct repercussions for the French film industry in terms of exports, development of local infrastructures and work opportunities.

For Hjort (2010, 20), ‘cosmopolitan transnationalism’ highlights multiple belonging and trajectories of migration, thus responding to an ideal of film capable of strengthening social imaginaries. This finds echoes in the work of Dimitris Eleftheriotis (2016, 203), for whom cosmopolitan cinema involves multi-ethnic groups of creative personnel and the utilisation of transnational channels of marketing, distribution and exhibition in its articulation of difference. All three features can be attached to Valerian and Anna, which are discussed in more detail below. For Felicia Chan (2017, 2), cosmopolitan heroes bring ‘mobility and adaptability to new cultures’, a feature that also fits Besson’s high-concept protagonists, who travel a great deal and are multilingual. Valerian and Laureline, the two protagonists, are extreme, intergalactic fantasies of cosmopolitan heroes, as are the exotic communities they visit. Anna, too, unlike the French protagonist of Nikita for example, is represented as a cosmopolitan figure, always on the move to complete her missions.

The transnational features found in EuropaCorp’s productions help to inform the nature of French popular cinema, as explored in this volume. They include familiar genre conventions and a superficial take on world politics and globalisation. The protagonists are mobile and mainly speak in English, displaying surface cosmopolitan rather than truly intercultural or transnational spirit. However, some of Besson’s own films retain some differentiation and Frenchness for different reasons that cannot be detailed here. It is significant that EuropaCorp’s technical crews are made up of a core of French regular associates and that Besson has worked since the 1990s with the same core teams of technical crew for stunts, special effects and so on. Thierry Arbogast, for example, has been his director of cinematography from Nikita to Anna. Hugues Tissandier has been production designer for Besson and EuropaCorp since Joan of Arc (Besson, 1999) and Olivier Bériot costume designer since Arthur et les Minimoys/Arthur and the Invisibles in 2006. Eric Serra has composed most of Besson’s soundtracks except Valerian. All these French contributors are part and parcel of the artistic signature of his films.

The Evolution of Luc Besson’s International Productions

Besson’s box-office successes predating EuropaCorp, Nikita in 1990, Leon in 1994 and especially The Fifth Element in 1997 attracted international mainstream audiences and were sometimes retrospectively identified as postnational (Hayward and Powrie 2006; Vanderschelden 2008). While EuropaCorp took on board the French cultural exception mechanisms (subsidies, specialist film and television financing funds and tax shelters), it was created as a European alternative to Hollywood majors designed to conquer global markets—with emphasis on the USA and Asia. The productions therefore reworked universal thematic or genre motifs, developing popular franchises like Taken and Transporter—a total of eight films between 2002 and 2018—that Besson wrote, produced and oversaw but did not direct. These helped to finance the global projects entirely created and directed by Besson, like the fantasy animation trilogy Arthur and the Invisibles (Besson, 2006, 2009, 2010) in the 2000s and Valerian in the 2010s.

As the leading main stockholder of EuropaCorp, Besson fulfilled his ambition of becoming a tycoon-like producer of global blockbusters. If the action films and international franchises had a mixed, often derogatory, critical reception in France, EuropaCorp was gradually recognised as a major player in the French film industry, increasing the visibility of new French action movie directors like Pierre Morel, Louis Leterrier or Franck Gastambide and experienced technicians, whose international careers thrived. Box-office results fluctuated, but the films regularly topped the French exports, establishing the company’s overt ‘conquering’ strategy of making popular films ‘with a blurred national anchoring’ (Delon and Vinuela 2020, 7). World audiences did not always realise that the Taken franchise, Lucy or the biopic of the Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi, The Lady (Besson, 2011) were all ‘registered’ as majority French productions from an industry perspective. In effect, Les Aventures extraordinaires d’Adèle Blanc-Sec/The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (Besson, 2010) was the last culture-specific film that Besson made in French. Adapted from Jacques Tardi’s bande dessinée (BD), filmed in French with a French cast, Adèle combined lavish production values and an overt cultural differentiation strategy, which impacted the marketing of the film as an international superproduction. For a substantial budget of €25 million Adèle was an honourable national success with 1.6 million admissions in France and $34 million returns worldwide, including the Chinese market. When acquiring the rights, Besson had envisaged a trilogy that never materialised (Lambie 2017).⁵ Arthur and Adèle sent warning signals that he chose to ignore about the limits of lavish adaptations of French popular culture in a globalised market context. Although Valerian’s adaptation was designed as a global blockbuster with inventive visual effects and an international cast, to be filmed in English, this was not enough to make cultural differentiation a recipe for a global blockbuster.

In 2010, the Revue des médias (Ragot 2010) had analysed EuropaCorp’s evolution and financial results, emphasising the high-tech values underlying its successful industrialisation. The eviction in 2011 of partner and producer Le Pogam, who had played an important and strategic editorial role at EuropaCorp, sent another strong signal. The arrival, in 2012, of a new business partner coming from advertising, Christophe Lambert, marked another turning point. His nomination as CEO coincided with the inauguration of the Paris studios at Cité du Cinéma, designed to expand production opportunities and the group’s autonomy with subsidiaries like Digital Factory for special effects and l’École de la Cité for training screenwriters, directors and technical crew in-house (Vanderschelden 2020). After 2011, however, EuropaCorp relied increasingly on its successful franchises, especially Transporter and Taken, deploying global distribution and exhibition strategies.⁶ As Meir (2020, 123) has argued convincingly, RED, the Relativity subsidiary created in 2014 to distribute the films in the USA, contributed to EuropaCorp’s increasing debt at least as much as Valerian’s mixed box-office results.

Throughout his career, in an obsession to compete with Hollywood, Besson has moved the goalposts from national cinemas to test out global filmmaking opportunities in a fast-changing industry. Yet his growing reputation as an international producer and director was double-edged. If his name was associated with flair and a vision, his taste for excess also caused financial difficulties. Making alliances with local partners to access the US and Chinese distribution markets from a European base is another example of misunderstanding the markets. It follows the setbacks of the Arthur trilogy’s dwindling success and The Lady’s flop (only earning $7.6 million worldwide despite a €21 million budget). ⁷ In both cases, the US market let him down, prefiguring the resistance that a project like Valerian could face. Even the global success of Lucy can be viewed retrospectively as leading to a false sense of security.

With Lucy, Besson combined an effective high-concept and universal generic sci-fi conventions (including numerous cinematic references that world audiences would recognise) with his own personal style and technical expertise (Vanderschelden 2020, 163–164). A EuropaCorp, TF1 and Canal+ co-production costing €49 million, it was filmed in the Cité du Cinéma studios in English. Distributed on a global level as a blockbuster and benefitting from the international stardom of Scarlett Johansson and Morgan Freeman, it attracted 5 million spectators in France and the world receipts exceeded $463 million, which translated into 1000 per cent profitability ratio and 50 per cent of the takings garnered by French films abroad in 2015. Without resolving EuropaCorp’s financial exposure after 2011, this staggering return was interpreted as a sign of vitality. Besson underestimated the changes in the film industry when launching Valerian’s production after 10 years of gestation, describing his project as nothing less than the first episode of a ‘French Star Wars franchise’ (Dumazet 2017).⁸

Valerian: Too French for a Global Blockbuster

In the context of EuropaCorp’s recurrent financial difficulties after 2012, Valerian’s record budget of €197 million, oversized by European standards, always represented a great financial risk despite substantial international pre-sales.⁹ The transnational cast included Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne, with Clive Owen, Ethan Hawke, Herbie Hancock, Alain Chabat and the singer Rihanna in supporting roles, as part of a careful strategy to attract young international audiences, but appears not to have been iconic enough to bring the charismatic figures to life—Valerian’s corny humour and Laureline’s feminist modernity in the punchy dialogue imagined by Pierre Christin for the BDBande dessinée (BD) often fell flat in the film. The international technical crew included most of Besson’s familiar French core team. The Oscar-winning Alexandre Desplat replaced the usual partner Serra—which surprised many but produced a soundtrack adopting the codes of the Hollywood sci-fi genre. The shooting took place in the seven studios of the Cité du Cinéma over a hundred days and required 65 sets; 2206 people were involved on set, including 115 actors and 552 extras (Allociné 2017). Besson, once again, fully embraced the latest digital age technology, multiplying inventive digital effects never seen before in a European film. Peter Jackson’s New Zealand company WETA was responsible for 600 shots, including the motion captures of 200 different types of aliens and intergalactic creatures—particularly the humanoids of planet Mül (Fig. 1). Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) created around 1000 effects for settings such as the grand ‘big market’ scene (Fig. 2), while Canadian company Rodeo focused on spatial vehicles and fight scenes (Besson in Lambie 2017). Up to 80 cameras were used for motion capture and 1371 people worked on the post-production of the 2734 shots requiring visual effects.¹⁰ In his efforts to update his take on global blockbusters, Besson straddled (local) differentiation and (global) blockbuster values. On the one hand, he needed to attract the Valérian et Laureline BD fans by retaining the spirit of a dated, culturally specific iconic French BD. On the other hand, he sought, perhaps naively, to create a global blockbusting event, as Spielberg had done with his lavish computer-animated adventure film adaptation of Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin (2011).¹¹ Obsessed with competing with the likes of the Star Wars franchise and Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), Besson prioritised the technical production values and global marketing arsenal over a solid transnational screenplay. Valerian’s shallow characters and dialogue were often harshly criticised in reviews, and many viewers, especially outside France, found the narrative arcs difficult to follow.¹²

Fig. 1

Spectacular digital effects in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets: planet Mül and its princess

Fig. 2

Recreating the big market for the screen

Released in 81 countries from July 2017, Valerian garnered $225 million in ticket sales, which was not enough to cover the global marketing and distribution costs. Though it attracted a respectable 4 million spectators in France, it was possibly disadvantaged by a global summer release calqued on the Hollywood model, but ill-suited to European summer cinemagoing habits. However, low US takings—only $40 million receipts for 3500 screens—represented the main commercial setback. The Chinese release by Fundamental Films, EuropaCorp’s Chinese financial partner, in August on 9000 screens broke the earnings record for a French film. In Asia, it represented 75 per cent of entries for 2017 (Sallé 2018), but this did not compensate for the poor results in the USA.

On a purely cultural level, adapting a French BD from the 1970s in 2017, albeit the one that had inspired George Lucas for Star Wars and Besson for The Fifth Element, was risky. Valerian’s intergalactic world is cosmopolitan and transnational in spirit, but it lacks some of the ‘totalising’ elements required of blockbusters, namely universal genre and narrative features facilitating global circulation (Michael 2020, 207). Besson is perceived more as ‘impressive in his ability to express idiosyncratic tendencies through the lens of a big-budgeted spectacle; this is tentpole auteurism’ (Perez 2017). Valerian thus stands at the intersection between an individual artist’s film and a product.¹³ Its technical execution matches Hollywood standards, but its heterogeneity, a trademark of Besson’s style, limits its ability to develop a high concept. The proliferation of inventive visual ideas and intertextual citations from classic films that made Lucy a global hit (Vanderschelden 2020, 162–164) become flaws for Valerian. For example, the film resists becoming homogenised as generic Hollywood sci-fi, and its duo of emerging stars fails to win over audiences all over the world across generations. Its quirky characters and multilingual dialogue requiring subtitles—especially the disconcerting silly jokes of the script (which did not feature in the original cartoons)—are difficult to reconcile with the constraints of fast-paced innovative spectacle demanded by global blockbuster events targeting wide young audiences. More generally, the cultural references to a vintage sci-fi world—often faithfully imported from Jean-Claude Mézières’s visual imaginary world—engender ‘discrepancies’ (Cousin 2017) and expose the dangers of differentiation (Dumazet 2017). Even before addressing any marketing and distribution considerations, Besson’s juggling between loyalty to his source and blockbuster conventions represents an unattainable ideal.

Valerian’s marketing campaign started well before 2017 with teasers published on social media and information on the shooting released strategically in the French press (Picard 2016). It raised expectations from Besson’s regular audiences worldwide, as well as Francophone BD fans, while the intensive use of social media targeted younger audiences (Chenel 2017). The global marketing campaign, estimated between $60 and $100 million, and not part of the official budget, worsened EuropaCorp’s debt.¹⁴ It also highlighted the pitfalls awaiting French films aspiring to the status of global blockbusters. Besson devoted large amounts of energy and money to accessing new technologies and social media, but his notorious culture of secrecy and reluctance to do press previews may have been counterproductive. For example, Charlie Michael’s reception overview (2020, 127–129) shows that international/US-based critics were disconcerted by the film’s heterogeneous balancing act, while Thomas Pillard’s assessment of the film’s reception on IMDb (2020, 194–198) confirms the volatility of global success. As mentioned earlier, Valerian was not the first of Besson’s differentiated transnational superproductions to fail to attract the US audiences. If the damage caused by the Arthur venture was probably understated in business reports (Le Guilcher 2016, 198–201), the scope of Valerian’s financial gamble was such that it could not be erased by another film or new strategic plan. When EuropaCorp scaled down to three to five mid-budget films in English per year and Anna was rushed into production in October 2017, it felt like the last chance to recentre business and ease a mounting debt crisis.¹⁵

Anna: A Past-Facing Postnational Product

Anna was shot using Besson’s regular teams in France, Bulgaria and Russia for a €30 million budget mainly sourced from international pre-sales. Its international release, initially planned for 2018, was postponed by the independent distributor Lionsgate Films (Summit Entertainment) following Besson’s lawsuit for allegations of sexual misconduct and concurrent rumours of EuropaCorp’s imminent sale (see Murray 2019). By April 2019, only an international trailer had circulated. Anna was eventually released in the USA on 21 June and by Pathé in France on 30 June with limited promotional campaigns. The film’s reception and its global takings of $31 million were considered disastrous—though hardly surprising given the conditions of release. In France, Anna only attracted 430,000 spectators in two weeks amid relative media indifference, ending its career at 736,000. However, despite a record-low $7 million in takings from 2114 screens in the USA, it still topped the French film exports for 2019 (Unifrance 2019).

Reminding us of Besson’s past successes and recycling familiar genre conventions, Anna takes a back-to-basics approach in a delusional attempt to reboot the made-in-France action film. Set in the late 1980s to early 1990s, the plot revolves around a young Russian woman (Sasha Luss) recruited as a hitwoman by a KGB agent and trained by a handler (Olga, played by Helen Mirren) before being co-opted by CIA agents to retrieve information and kill the KGB boss. Returning to the safety of (now vintage-looking) postmodern neo-noir thriller, Anna deploys pastiches of formulaic action scenes from Nikita and Lucy. For example, the screenplay recycles a phoney (training test) mission in a restaurant with escape routes blocked and acrobatic escape scenes down chutes. It even reprises many of their specific stylish and spectacular aesthetic details: girl with gun (see Figs. 3 and 4), graphic violence with forks as fetishised weapons, choreographed single-handed fight scenes, car chases and physical transformations (glamorous outfits and wigs). Though Anna often feels like a straight remake of Nikita, it is easy to see why Besson chose to revisit the iconic 1990s high concept and the figure of action movie heroine. But rather than engaging with generic and thematic rebooting for the twenty-first century, he played the card of nostalgia, hoping to entice new audiences as well as his core fanbase still ‘drawn to his distinctive approach to action and fantasy films, which combine the aloof cool of fashion photography with comic book exaggeration’ (Murray 2019). By trying too hard to reach wide audiences, Besson seems to have relied on postnational features that are in contradiction with the period in which he set the film. This generates anachronisms in the narrative, such as the use of cellular phones, computers and the internet by characters living before 1990. Despite Mirren’s performance, the character of Olga is stereotyped and lacks credibility. More importantly, the lack of a coherent script affects Anna’s universal appeal and postnational agenda.

Fig. 3

Nikita fulfilling her contract in the Blue Train restaurant in Nikita

Fig. 4

Anna fulfilling her contract in the hotel room in Anna

‘Postnational’, as used in Martine Danan’s discussions of French cinema from the late 1990s (Danan 1996), qualifies a process of ‘erasure of distinctive elements which have traditionally helped to define the imaginaries and traditions of national cinemas against Hollywood’ (Danan 2006, 177).¹⁶ As this volume shows, other definitions of postnational have since become broader to embrace the variety of ways in which films may address a mainstream popular international audience from the outset, carefully calibrating rather than simply eclipsing markers of nation or region. After Besson failed to impose Valerian as a transnational global blockbuster, for Anna he tried to adopt more exaggeratedly postnational production strategies. His script reduced Frenchness to a minimum and national identities to coarse stereotypes or glossy postcards (as the Taken and Transporter franchises had done before). The Anglophone cast distinguished Anna from Nikita—a film shot mainly in Paris with a French-speaking cast. While in Valerian, the casting, genre conventions, language and spaces were counterbalanced by the cultural capital that the French BD adaptation entailed, most traces of French cultural or cinematic traditions were deliberately erased in Anna, leaving only a superficial, cosmopolitan postnational setting. If Besson updates the technical execution of his action cinema via some incursions into video-game aesthetics (photography, use of zoom and close-ups), the plot fragmentation hardly reboots the female action or spy movie genres to reinvent postnational narrative forms. An array of flashbacks, flashforwards and cosmopolitan urbanscapes knits together the action scenes imbricated in a ‘Russian doll cubism rewriting of [Besson’s] fantasy female protagonist’ (Mandelbaum 2019). Nothing in the screenplay suggests any interest in, or commentary on, political, gender and cultural changes in the world since the 1980s. By casting Luss, a top model of the 2010s with high visibility on social media, however, he strives to attract younger global audiences, updating his marketing strategy to new modes of celebrity resting on looks and fast-paced action entertainment. As a result, Anna offers little differentiation from Hollywood action movies, while sending mixed messages to world audiences. ¹⁷ By aiming to be more postnational than Valerian, the film eschews a distinctive generational target and loses its identity, being neither a French action movie nor a global entertainment commodity, its budget preventing comparison with lavish Hollywood blockbusters. The cosmopolitan Parisian and Russian settings remain purely decorative spaces in which the protagonist operates. In particular, the lack of stars immediately identifiable worldwide—a flaw already found in Valerian—constitutes a further obstacle for marketing a global cultural event.

As an action heroine, Anna reproduces some familiar traits identified in Besson’s previous female characters (social isolation, looks and physical energy). However, she does not reach the universality of postnational action heroines (Lara Croft). Unlike Nikita or Lucy, Anna remains a glossy character—she is even filmed modelling as part of her undercover missions. Though her behaviour is more sexually explicit than Nikita’s, her affair with Maude (Lera Abova) seems a half-hearted nod towards gender fluidity. Her relationships and the sex scenes with her male co-leads (played by Luke Evans and Cillian Murphy), in which she is seen in a range of sexy outfits, primarily suggest fetishised objectification. This nullifies Anna’s empowerment as a female who, after being manipulated by men, becomes manipulator to regain her freedom. As noted in the LA Times review, it is ‘hard to watch Anna without thinking about Besson’s off-screen issues, given that it’s about a woman who stands up for herself after a lifetime of being abused and manipulated by men’ (Murray 2019). Variety also notes that the photographers, as portrayed in the film, could easily be seen as caricatures of tyrannical film directors (Debruge 2019). The narrative could also be read as a post-#MeToo token admission by Besson of his own exploitative use of actresses in his films. More crucially, the reception of Anna demonstrates how the action heroines that Besson imagined for several decades may no longer be attuned to the current global cultural climate. Anna is a one-dimensional, calculating protagonist, devoid of Lucy’s offbeat personality or Nikita’s mixture of wildness and moving vulnerability. Luss’s performance style is mainly kinetic, displaying video-game stylisation, but lacking the sensuality of Johansson or the mysterious ‘French’ charm of androgynous Parillaud. Trapped in a twentieth-century narrative mode smacking of retro nostalgia, Besson seems to be ‘running after a train that he cannot catch’ (Goldberg 2019).

Besson, through EuropaCorp, continued after 2015 to employ transnational strategies and imagine popular films designed for the global market by deploying high concepts, universal cultural markers, English as the main language, cosmopolitan protagonists and transnational stars. With Valerian, he sought to produce an ambitious global blockbuster, hoping that he could renegotiate differentiation and audience expectations in an increasingly globalised digital cinema market, but failed. Hastily recycling universal generic action movie codes that were part of his trademark, he tried to bounce back with a more postnational film, Anna, that became his worst commercial flop.

If throughout his career Besson has adopted controversial methods attracting harsh criticism, he also undeniably imagined alternatives to Hollywood cinema that for over 30 years brought his vision of popular cinema to a national film industry challenged by the digital revolution and launched new generations of French film professionals. Some of EuropaCorp’s action movies competed with Hollywood, offering alternative global popular entertainment at lower cost. But Besson’s defiant obsession to conquer the globalised market as a form of cultural resistance led to risky expansion moves and alliances that he could not always control. Not only did he impose controversial changes that weakened the group, but he also misjudged Hollywood, whose tested method for countering competition since the 1920s has consisted of forging alliances with challengers only to absorb them. By overlooking basic commercial rules and cultural codes to impose Valerian as a global blockbuster on the US and Chinese markets, he accelerated the group’s demise. The attempt at bouncing back with Anna proved that launching a film to a world audience requires a clear business plan and a solid marketing campaign.

Finally, Besson underestimated the importance of celebrity and reputation in a networked, globalised cultural environment still dominated by Hollywood. In France, he had absorbed relentless attacks because his vision of cinema clashed with the national critical canons; his role in the local film industry and his impact on French exports were noted, but rarely acknowledged to mitigate his reputation.¹⁸ However, recurrent allegations and court cases in France since 2000 (linked to plagiarism as well as political collusion and financial malpractice) never prevented him from financing his films. In Hollywood, Besson had developed a solid trademark and business reputation (Le Guilcher 2016, 289). Yet, the minute his name was associated with sexual misconduct, in the post-Weinstein and #MeToo era, he lost the support of his US partners, whereas his previous judicial problems had not affected his international career.

In 2022, the once familiar EuropaCorp logos have disappeared from cinemas, while the re-formed group’s communication and social media visibility are sparse. Following the global pandemic’s impact on the film industry, the studios in Paris were sold to Tunisian entrepreneur Tarak Ben Ammar in February 2022. After a three-year blackout, June 2022 saw the release in France of Arthur, malédiction/Arthur Curse (Barthélemy Grossman, 2022), a €2.24 million French horror film and spin-off of the trilogy produced by Besson’s new company LBP (Henni 2022). The shooting at his Normandy property of a self-authored screenplay points towards a low-key return to recycling and auto-citation. Meanwhile, another film starring Caleb Landry Jones, DogMan, produced by LBP and EuropaCorp USA and written and directed by Besson, has been produced with only a handful of his former French collaborators. Virginie Besson Silla, appointed CEO of EuropaCorp USA for films and TV programmes in November 2020, is the co-producer. Dogman was released in September 2023; however, the gap left by EuropaCorp in the French film industry has cast serious doubts on the future of global blockbusters made in France.