Luc Besson's debut: Le dernier combat

French director Luc Besson famously swore he would only direct 10 films but The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec - based on the comic books by Jacques Tardi and due out in the UK tomorrow - will be his thirteenth, with at least two more in the pipeline. (He's also writer-producer on the Taxi and Transporter series.)

Many of the tropes familiar from his movies were already in place for 1983's Le dernier combat (The Last Battle), his remarkably assured, near silent, first feature. Its opening shot is of a man shagging a blow-up doll, which slowly deflates: it establishes the search for (heterosexual) sex in a vogueish, post-apocalyptic, black-and-white world by the character, played by co-writer Pierre Jolivet, who also co-scripted Besson's follow up, Subway (1985).

For his first films Besson kept quite a team around him: cinematographer Carlo Varini shot Le dernier combat, Subway and The Big Blue (1988), while editor Sophie Schmit worked on the first two. A couple of Besson regulars share the screen: ageing character actor Jean Bouise (Subway, The Big Blue) and Jean Reno, cast in the slow-brute role that would become familiar to him in Subway, The Big Blue and, most successfully, Leon (1994). There are echoes, too, of the penchant for slapstick humour rife in those movies - the dumb show and prat fall being particular favourites - and a reflexive reaction shot used for comedy.

Besson's sense for visual setpieces is immediate - despite budget restrictions, some flying sequences reflect the visceral pleasure the director clearly feels when diving in The Big Blue. Soundtrack regular Eric Serra is already in place (there's a gag with a screwed up tape here reprised in Subway's opening chase), pleasingly experimental at rare moments, otherwise pure lounge.

As a young teenager, Subway was one of the first films to open up the possibilities of cinema to me, and when I was a student in Paris I caught a repertoire screening of Le dernier combat in a cinema off the Champs-Elysées and sought out different versions of The Big Blue, including a giant projection at Le Grand Rex and one with scenes I'm sure have still not been included on any DVD edit I've seen. I haven't seen any of his films since The Fifth Element in 1997, a run that includes Joan of Arc (1999) and Angel-A (2005); forthcoming feature The Lady, about Aung Saan Suu Kyi, sounds simply alarming.

Underground cinema 2: the Paris Métro on film

Fred Cavayé's tremendous Point Blank is due to be released in the UK 20 May and I can't recommend it highly enough. The French thriller (which I suspect will be marketed so as to mask its nationality and maximise its audience) features a great chase scene in the Métro, so I thought I'd follow up my post on films in London's Underground with a look at movies set on the Parisian tube network.

Appropriately enough for the city of love, romance features highly - from The First Night (1958) by Georges Franju through to Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amelie (2001). In Bande à part (1964), Jean-Luc Godard's trio of Anna Karina, Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey invent stories for a sad-looking man on the Métro, while fellow nouvelle vaguer Francois Truffaut caught Le dernier métro (1980) with Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve in wartime.

Louis Malle acknowledged social unrest in his adaptation of Raymond Queneau's Zazie dans le métro (1960), when ingenue Catherine Demongeot arrives to find the underground barred by one of the system's endemic strikes. Bernardo Bertolucci also stayed above ground in Last Tango in Paris (1972) for those memorable shots of the Pont de Bir-Hakeim, where the Métro crosses above the Seine between the Eiffel Tower and the posh sixteenth arrondissement. Those views are replicated in Gilles Mimouni's stylish 1996 thriller L'appartement, featuring Vincent Cassel, Romane Bohringer and Monica Bellucci.

In another thriller, Jean-Pierre Melville mounted a chase in the underground, intercut with indicator bulbs lighting up on a tube map, in Le samourai (1967), starring Alain Delon. Peak time for Métro movies came in the 1980s with the cinéma du look when first Jean-Jacques Beineix burst onto the scene with Diva (1980), which features a chase through the Métro, on and off trains and up and down escalators - on a postman's scooter!

Luc Besson uncovered a world of bag snatchers, bodybuilders and pop wannabes down there in romantic comedy-thriller-musical Subway (1985), starring Christopher Lambert and Isabelle Adjani (pictured). Paris is always amenable to directors using its public spaces and so it was for Leos Carax' beautiful and audacious homeless romance, Les amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) - the most expensive French film ever.

The city's authorities were happy to close the bridge at the movie's heart for some filming but delays meant that shooting had to continue on a set recreated, with requisite Métro station, in the south of France. In a particularly brutal scene, Carax regular Denis Lavant runs through those iconic white-tiled corridors tearing down posters emblazoned with the image of his missing girlfriend, Juliette Binoche, before setting fire to the bill-sticker himself. It's a wonder Binoche doesn't stay clear of the Métro: she gets her carnet out again for Michael Haneke's Code Unknown (2000), which uses a confrontation with a young man on a train to examine similar racial themes to those in Hidden (Caché) five years later.