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This Film On

Nikita (a.k.a. La Femme Nikita)

(1991)

118 min. Samuel Goldwyn Company. Director: Luc Besson. Cast: Anne Parillaud, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Tcheky Karyo, Jeanne Moreau, Jean Reno.

Writer-producer-director Luc Besson made an international splash with his stylish thriller Nikita (known on these shores as La Femme Nikita). A spy version of Pygmalion, complete with perverse romance, Nikita was well ahead of the curve when it came to women warriors as modern shoot-'em-up stars (Nikita itself was remade in America as Point of No Return, starring Bridget Fonda). Anne Parillaud turns in a bold and wide-ranging performance as Nikita, a woman whose feminity goes from feral to sensitive. Despite the film's feminist placement of Nikita as action hero, Besson's film underlines his penchant for wedding humanism to artillery. What Nikita learns she really wants is to rediscover her humanity by enjoying relationships and eschewing cynical violence.

Despite that sensitive theme, Besson's film won a cult audience for its pumped-up action sequences. Opening with a botched robbery, Nikita quickly entraps its heroine in a cold white room. When a man in a black suit (Tcheky Karyo's Bob) enters, Nikita cries, "Mister, is this heaven here or not?" Hardly: her death has been faked as Bob saw potential in the brutal, nihilistic, seemingly untameable young woman. "I work, let's say for the government," Bob explains. We've decided to give you another chance...To serve your country." Soon, Nikita submits to a training regimen, in firearms, hand-to-hand combat, computer skills, and poise. She's even coached in beauty and grace by no less than Jeanne Moreau, who tells her, "Remember, there are two things that have no limit: femininity and the means of taking advantage of it."

When Bob serves her birthday cake sliced with a switchblade, the subtext is clear: Nikita is born again in this opportunity, however dangerous. What follows Besson paces steadily and at a good clip. Nikita is tested, then placed back into French society as a sort of sleeper agent. Longing for normality, she shadows a woman in a grocery store, buying whatever she buys, then gravitates to the first man she meets, the warmly funny grocery clerk at the checkout stand. Nikita tries to adopt a bourgeois lifestyle with Marco, but it's only a matter of time before the phone rings to assign her a mission she can't refuse.

Besson's knack for action is apparent in each crisp set piece, particularly a kitchen shootout that establishes Nikita's skill as an assassin, and though dark, Nikita is never less than lively, an aim helped considerably when Besson regular Jean Reno shows up as Victor, the cleaner (a character and situation that no doubt inspired Tarantino's Pulp Fiction four years later). Though oft imitated by lesser talents in pap like Tomb Raider and Resident Evil, Besson's estrogen-fueled actioner Nikita remains fresh.

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