LA FEMME NIKITA Movie Review

A young French woman (Anne Parillaud) is reprieved from her death sentence (she's been bad) and taught to be a much neater, better-looking killer. After years of training and New Wave charm school (yes, it's Pygmalion again), she starts her new job as assassin for a super-secret government agency. The irony is that once she's taught style, grace, manners, and class, she no longer wants to kill—but she has no choice. La Femme Nikita was a worldwide hit, and I'll confess that I predicted otherwise when I first saw a preview screening. My assumption was that this was an American movie at heart, and that audiences for French cinema—including the French—would reject it for the real thing. Oops. The movie didn't just catapult Luc Besson into the big time—it changed the direction of French cinema. Depending on your point of view, the movie can be considered a much-needed economic savior for a national film industry that was struggling—or, it can be seen as a death-knell for the kind of small, delicate drama that the French cinema is known for, and which is increasingly difficult to finance, distribute, and market worldwide. Is the movie good at what it does? Not bad. It looks great, and so does Anne Parillaud, but to put it politely, it's a waste of time. La Femme Nikita's violence is never stirring or even very exciting. The movie is all about style, and style is all that it's about. We're not talking about a lyrical, expressively violent style, like, say, Peckinpah or John Woo; it's just stylish, like a huge, bloody Gap ad. The emptiness turned out to be prophetic, for Besson (whose Bruce Willis vehicle, The Fifth Element, is one of the most successful French productions in history) is regarded—as Truffaut and Godard once were—as the French cinema's savior. Now that's scary. (The original French title is just plain Nikita, but the American distributor thought it might be considered a documentary on Khrushchev.) It became the basis for an American TV series as well as a flat-out remake called Point of No Return, starring Bridget Fonda.

NEXT STOP … Le Dernier Combat, Diva, Face/Off

1991 (R) 117m/C FR Anne Parillaud, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Tcheky Karyo, Jeanne Moreau, Jean Reno, Jean Bouise; D: Luc Besson; W: Luc Besson; C: Thierry Arbogast; M: Eric Serra. Cesar Awards '91: Best Actress (Parillaud). VHS THV, FCT, BTV