Le Dernier Combat (1983)

LE DERNIER COMBAT  (1983)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Luc Besson
    Pierre Jolivet, Jean Bouse, Jean Reno,
    Fritz Wepper, Petra Muller, Christiane Kruger
In the wake of some unnamed catastrophic event, three men try to elude, outwit, or kill each other while picking their way through a ruined world. They're identified only as "The Man," "The Doctor" and "The Brute." Luc Besson's wordless first feature is a strange avant-garde experiment in black and white, like a Mad Max movie directed by Jacques Tati and written by Samuel Beckett. Or something. If nothing else, it's unusual. Ping pong and nitrous oxide are still available in this hellish universe, which helps take the edge off the apocalypse, and the unmistakable resemblance between the doctor's murals and prehistoric cave paintings has to be telling us something, right? In a movie where it sometimes rains rocks and sometimes fish, you never know.