In The Fifth Element, Bruce Willis’s character kisses Leeloo, played by Milla Jovovich, while she’s unconscious. She cannot consent. She’s also an almost literal example of the “born sexy yesterday” trope: newly brought into the world, unfamiliar with its customs, and unable to speak the language. She’s here to save the planet, and his way of waking her up is to kiss her.
My question is: why a kiss? He could have tried any number of other ways to wake her. Why did the filmmakers choose this one?
What makes the scene especially strange is that the film recognizes the violation. Leeloo makes it clear that he cannot kiss her without her permission, and the movie returns to that boundary more than once. Willis’s character knows he was wrong and berates himself for it. The issue isn’t something viewers have to read into the scene; the film explicitly raises it.
But by the end, their romance seems to serve as his absolution. He rescues her, helps save the world, and wins her love, while the earlier violation drops out of the story. Her eventual feelings for him resolve the narrative tension without resolving the question the film itself raised. Falling in love with someone later does not retroactively make an earlier kiss consensual. So why introduce that violation, acknowledge it, and then let a happy ending stand in for addressing it?
I have many theories about the movie itself, the easy to self-insert working man, who was once a soldier, making it easy for America to understand etc. etc., but I don't have one for this. Hollywood used to play it fast and loose with consent, but why -- this ... it knows its wrong. I can't legally say the director is a rapist -- but this is not helping his case as far as the image goes.
This was so frustrating, that I couldn't enjoy the movie. I didn't care, same as I didn't care in Avatar when Jake takes over the Toruk when people hadn't done it for decades -- just non-sensical self-insert and the savior trope. And both of these have plausible deniability ("Leeloo is the one who actually saves the day"/"Jake Sully was actually helped by the Na'vi" but it's not the case though - why are we pretending.)
I have a bone to pick with Hollywood -- don't do extensive world building and then piss on it with these weird scenes. Obsession, Backrooms, modern cinema etc is so much better.