La Femme Nikita (1991)

When the film opens, Nikita is a frail young woman who's literally dragged to a robbery, everyone is excited, but she seems absent, hanging on the miserable hope to get her fix. When everything goes wrong (and that's an understatement) she is sitting on the ground, passively watching cops and punks kill and being killed. At that point, she seems like a victim but then she cold-bloodily shoots a cop who actually cared for her, then even for us, she's beyond any kind of redemption. Things go rather quickly: she's arrested, put on trial and sentenced for perpetuity.But there's something in Anne Parillaud's performance (that won the French Oscar for Best Actress, the only award the film received) that turns Nikita into a genuinely enigmatic personality, we don't like her, there's not much question that she's a bad woman, but she's also a weird, infantile, grotesque, rude and excessively unpredictable person. The film doesn't suggest that she's victim of herself, but simply that there's a sort of vacuum in her life, her education or her mind that let criminal impulses fill it, she's bad but in an accidental sort of way. The film then ventures in "realistic fantasy" when she's put to sleep by injection and wakes up in a secret government organization specialized in recruiting new profiles for assignments to kill. What did they see in Nikita, we never know but the man in charge of her 'reeducation' is Bob, played by the great Tcheky Karyo and he's convinced that the girl has potential.Luc Besson knows his craft, he expected that the whole first act would consist on showing the evolution of Nikita from that sorry-excuse-for-a-woman to a professional female killer, meaning in subtext, that she'll have to become a woman as well, it's a rebirth, a metamorphosis she'll owe to her new job, and what an irony that killing people will be the counterpart to being alive. This paradox will shape the second personality of Nikita, who'll never stop to be a tortured woman but in a different way, she's just starting to enjoy life but the catch of her redemption consists on cold-blooded murders. But Besson knows our disbelief won't be suspended for long if the change isn't believable, we could believe his Leon was such a pro because we didn't see his back-story or his training, for Nikita, the film will have to become a character-study, and I guess this is why Besson started with an action sequence and some unexpected outburst during the training part.Nikita's unpredictability is the key to her appeal as an original character, until we know it's time to get over it, but it allows Besson to find the right balance between action and drama, and some moments like the interactions with Jeanne Moreau, teaching her how to smile, how to be a woman, is one of these emotional reliefs the story asks for. And it turns out that, because her life is still at stakes, because she's supposed to be dead and she's easily disposable, she becomes a real woman, feminine, pretty and gentle. And then, something interesting happens, there's a transfer from Nikita to the script in the unpredictability department, Nikita remains the same woman, vulnerable and melancholic and the excitement, the thrills come from Besson's hard-edged script. Yes, he is an expert of cinema "du look" as they say in France, and yes, he was one of these new talents with vision but he doesn't get enough credit for his screen writing. Her relationship with Pygmalion Bob is one of the aspects that elevate the film.I will not reveal all the film but there's just one scene that works on a perfect tertiary tempo, and it's just fascinating. Nikita is invited to a restaurant with Bob to celebrate her 'graduation', her gift is wrapped in a box, she opens it and her smile vanishes: it's a gun. She must kill someone. First surprise. She has three minutes to do it after Bob leaves, no time to think. Second surprise. She's suppose to get off from a little window located in men's toilets, when she gets there, it's walled. Third surprise. Each time, we see nothing coming, we're literally put in her high-heel shoes and try to figure out how she'll get from that situation. The action sequences that go after are spectacular but traditional, yet it works because Besson makes his action sequences as a dressing, not as a meal, the film is a terrific thriller because of the set-ups rather than the outcomes, the anticipation rather than the action especially since Nikita isn't exactly the Leon-professional type, the film almost works on a Hitchcockian level.And it could have worked alone with Nikita, Bob and the missions, but Besson adds a third dimension, a romance. Nikita falls in love with a gentle and smiling cashier played by Jean-Hugues Anglade, he's obviously not expecting such a beauty to approach him, but she does. Maybe because she's like him, she feels like an outcast, and she could tell he would love her, the organization reeducated her, but there was still a little void in her heart, and I just love how the film never tries to create artificial obstacles in their love, it's pure, passionate love, and it will overlap with the killing missions in the most creative and again, unexpected ways. That's exactly what I love about the film, it provides unexpected moments of thrills and emotions without being too original, it's a good thriller, romance and character-study.And trust Besson to always find a way to surprise you, every mission is memorable in a climactic or anti-climactic way, and just when it gets too routinely, he introduces one of this great supporting characters, Victor the Cleaner, played by Jean Reno, perhaps foreshadowing his performance as Léon. Victor is here for ten minutes but he makes the show but that's another story.

Upon cinematic release, being fascinated with Bridget Fonda, I watched 'Point of No Return', which I enjoyed but had no idea it was based on Besson's film. Badham's work was okay in my books, but nothing spectacular. Over the years I had loved those films of his I had seen ('Leon: The Professional', 'The Fifth Element', 'The Family' and 'Lucy'), and decided I wanted to see his earlier classic. I like the fact that Besson always has some hand in the writing, and the exquisite and graceful small part he wrote for acting legend Jeanne Moreau, virtually a microcosm of everything splendid she had ever brought to the screen. Besson has a very good feel for the genres his films represent--he plays to his strengths, and is not afraid to stick to his guns (for example, I'm glad he chose the ending that he did). The two significant extras on my DVD, remarking on the making of the film, and the sound selections by scorer Eric Serra, were both informative and entertaining, and added significant value. I highly recommend the experience to those who only think of 'The Fifth Element' when they think of Luc's work--you're in for a real treat...

Convicted felon Nikita, instead of going to jail, is given a new identity and trained, stylishly, as a top secret spy/assassin.This film had difficulty holding my attention. I wanted it to, because I know it is something of a cult classic. But it just did not have much going for it that interested me. The advertising even seemed weird, comparing this film to "Lethal Weapon". Huh? The best part was probably the casting of Jean Reno. Although he may be somewhat typecast in popular imagination as a thug or hit-man (see, of course, "The Professional"), this happens to be the sort of role he excels at. Being one of the guys with a gun in this film made it more enjoyable.

It doesn't matter how good the acts are, it doesn't matter how good the production is... If the screenplay is faulty, everything is at fault. La Femme Nikita had every single potential element to be a classic and even cult movie but the screenplay failed the whole thing from the very beginning. Why the French secret service recruited Nikita in first place? A junkie (Dark grey almost rotten teeth) murderer of a policeman who proved to be completely insane as they could not even let her in common ward in fear of her causing harm to other inmates, basically a sick persona who belonged to mental hospital rather than a prison. Granted that they wanted a killer walking dead to do their dirty and most dangerous job (I'll emphasis on this subject later) but the killer ghost is not supposed to be the crazy untamed animal as Nikita was. The whole Idea was a child's dream, a very big defect in screenplay from the very start. As the movie continues, we see no development in Nikita's training as an assassin. First she does not cooperate and then all the sudden she decides to cooperate because she realizes that she has only 2 weeks to prove herself worthy but we would not see what happened in next 2 weeks and in reality nothing can happen in 2 weeks but anyways, couple of vague scenes follows and then we see her at her 23rd birthday, 3 years passed and we saw nothing of her training and her character development from that early wild animal to a classy lady assassin. It appears that there is a romance going on between her and Rico but that's just a guess from the following acts so I wonder what's the point of making a rated R movies if it's supposed to appear like a PG-13? Another gross failure. Now let's see how is she doing as an assassin/secret agent. I hoped to see something extraordinary to compensate for the previous failures but no! nothing. Her first job is to deliver a bugged plate to a room in a hotel. Her second assignment is to shoot a lady with sniper rifle. Really? did they go through all that to recruit her to do these kind of jobs? and then comes the embassy mission. Again a gross failure in development of the story. 6 months to plan for a very simple mission made complicated. The whole idea of kidnapping the senior diplomat and impersonating someone else as him was one big joke aside from the fact that it doesn't make sense for the secret service to plan 6 months on a mission as basic as that. Anyways, that mission was supposed to be the climax of the movie but still the question remains. Didn't they have normal decent agents to do this job? and at the end she leaves/escapes. leaving her fiancé behind and of course a final confrontation between to lovers/supposed to be rivals and that's it. Actions never justified the causes. The whole thing became a big joke. I would say there was entertainment value in the movie to some extent but it was a cheesy B movie at its best.