Director: Luc Besson
Screenplay: Luc Besson
Starring: Anne Parillaud, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Tchéky Karyo, Jeanne Moreau, Jean Bouise, Jean Reno, Philippe Leroy, Roland Blanche, Jacques Boudet,
Country: France
Running Time: 117m
Year: 1990
When we think of action cinema, most of us probably think of Arnie, Sly, etc. First Blood, Terminator and their ilk defined the genre. In truth, they were bombastic and rather safe versions of the grungy exploitation flicks of the 70s, made more palatable for mass audiences. Characterisation had been lost, admittedly for a huge amount of fun, but story came second.
So I’ve always been a bit fascinated by the criticism pointed at director Luc Besson that he was all style over substance. Well, that was largely true but it was the era, and, if anything, he did try to do something interesting. From his work, we went a step further down the genre rabbit-hole to find the Euro-Thriller. Glossy, brash, violent, ironic and almost clumsily sentimental, from Nikita and Leon we’d get to Ronin, The Bourne Identity and so on, though few would be as eccentric.
Re-released this month, in extra glossy UHD, Besson’s original glossy thriller La Femme Nikita is worth a reappraisal. Straight out of the gate, it visually and sonically packs a punch and feels fresh even now. In a neon-soaked rainy Paris, we open on a gang of punks, dragging an unconscious body along the road (why? No idea, just go with it) before they rob a pharmacy. The police arrive, armed to the teeth, but Anne Parillaud as Nikita still murders one of the cops and earns a life sentence for her trouble. The French Government fake her death and subsequently give her one last chance; to be trained as an assassin by Tchéky Karyo.
We’re already pushing the boundaries of plausibility and the morals of anti-heroes. Nikita was a junkie who murdered a cop and seemed almost rabid. Over the course of several years, they not only train her to be an efficient assassin, but basically rehabilitate her too. So much so she falls in love and wants to get married, even though she’s a sleeper agent waiting any moment for the next job. This is what critics mean when they talk about style over substance, because if there’s a sub-text here, some kind of social commentary, it’s confused as hell. But there is no sub-text, so just strap in and enjoy the emotional manipulation as it joins together a series of super-cool hits.
It’s an eccentric style, a laissez-faire approach to a narrative that shouldn’t hold together, but Besson does just that. The set-pieces are phenomenal, confident and dripping with style. Anne Parillaud is key to convincing as both lethal assassin and Besson muse of fragile femininity. It all goes a bit predictable and sentimental in the last act, especially following the farcical and gruesome introduction of Jean Reno’s ‘Cleaner’ (a proto-Leon).
The modern world of action seems to be having an identity crisis. Clones of Bond, or trying not to be Bond, including Bond itself. And the stories of lone or secret assassins with versions of amnesia keep popping up (indeed, John Wick is about to release an all too obvious spin-off, Ballerina), but I miss the confidence and freshness of Besson and his contemporaries like John Woo. When the brutality of the 70s needed to be packaged for a new audience, they found an interesting vein to mine.
VIDEO
The shifts in style possibly contribute to an image that is rarely clean. The contrast is heavy, bleeding into the grain. The image is already wide and when Besson goes with an even wider focal length, the image positively warps at the edge.
This is no criticism. It feels alive and brutal. We don’t want Nikita clean. We don’t want it neat. Like her room-cum-cell in the training centre, the film should be punked. There’s a beautiful enigma within both the story and the image and UHD accentuates the edges, defining detail previously lost without rendering the film as something it isn’t. It’s not supposed to be flawless, but it’s never looked better.
EXTRA FEATURES
The extra features are a mixed bag of largely archive interviews and out of context behind the scenes footage. There’s a lot of material, but it needed more structure.
- At the heart of Nikita – Making Of
- Nikita Tour
- Interview with actress Anne Parillaud
- Interview with actor Tchéky Karyo
- Interview with actor Jean-Hugues Anglade
- Interview with assistant director Christophe Vassort
- Interview with restoration supervisor André Labbouz