Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.
La Femme Nikita is a dynamic action film featuring a unique plot element: the Pygmalion-like transformation of a pathetic, drug-addled female street punk into a methodical government assassin. Otherwise its your basic violent thriller.
Historical Background: Luc Besson is a man on the rise in the film world. His debut film, Le Dernier Combat (1984) drew scant little attention but he quickly followed that with Subway (1985) and The Big Blue (1988) that put his name on the cinematic map. La Femme Nikita (1990) was his first major hit. He followed that in 1994 with The Professional, which is my personal favorite of Besson’s films. I’ve also enjoyed The Fifth Element (1997). Besson then directed The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (2000), which was not all that well received. Besson’s forte might be described as psycho-romantic thrillers.
The Story: The film opens on a group of punk-style hoodlums marching down a Parisian street in the middle of the night, dragging one of their number who is too drugged up to walk. They are intent on robbing a drug store, which incidentally belongs to the father of one of the gang members. The alarm goes off and the five street punks are interrupted while searching for narcotics, first, by the owner and, second, by a squad of heavily armed policeman. In the ensuing shootout, four of the punks are killed as well as two policemen. One of the surviving policeman comes across the fifth gang member, a young woman, who is lying quietly in a semi-catatonic state listening to her walkman – oblivious to most of what has transpired. When the policeman lowers his gun, however, to converse with the strung-out gal, she vacantly raises a pistol to his neck and blows him away.
The young woman (Anne Parillaud) is taken into custody and interrogated. A tough cop asks her what her name is and she replies, “Ni . ki . ta”, articulating each syllable. The cop takes this as insolence and strikes her across the face, knocking her to the ground. He warns her that she had better drop the attitude and again demands her name. She asks for a pencil to write it down and when it is handed to her, she uses it to stab the man’s hand clean through. Such are the social graces of Nikita.
Nikita is put on trial, found guilty in the deaths of the three patrolmen, and sentenced to life in prison with no consideration of parole for thirty years. She is just nineteen years of age. Unbeknownst to her, Nikita is selected for a special government program that trains killers for government-sponsored assassinations, based on her profile as an antisocial psychopath and killer with street smarts. She is drugged up for transport to the training facility and awakens in a barren cell, which she half imagines to be the afterworld. A man enters her cell and introduces himself as Bob (Tcheky Karyo). He explains that her death by suicide has already been faked and he shows her pictures of her own funeral. He explains that she will be offered an opportunity to join a special training program for government assassins. If she refuses, she will be put to death for real. Nikita asks if she can sleep on the offer and Bob allows her one hour. When he returns, Nikita ambushes him, grabs his gun, and tries to use him as a hostage for an escape. Soon, however, it becomes apparent that the rules of the facility prohibit opening the door even under threat to life. She can shoot Bob or not, but if she does, she’ll be shot to death immediately thereafter. Nikita backs down, tries to commit suicide (Bob always keeps the first chamber of his gun empty), gives up, and is shot in the leg by Bob for her effort.
Nikita reluctantly agrees to attempt the training. Her well-ingrained resistance to authority, however, limits her progress. Bob’s superior wants Nikita terminated but permits Bob a final two weeks to show evidence of progress. Realizing it’s do or die, Nikita buckles down. She has a natural aptitude and is soon mastering the weaponry and self-defense training. Another aspect of her training is a make-over and her guru in that department is Amande (Jeanne Moreau), an older woman of fading beauty, but one who was obviously once very attractive. Amande advises Nikita that there are only two limitless things in life: “femininity and the ways of taking advantage of it.” In a touching scene, Amande begins to teach Nikita how to smile. Viewers suddenly realize that they have seen nothing but a look of pathetic sorrow on her face to this point. Amande also teaches her the use of make-up, how to dress to kill (figuratively and, in Nikita’s case, literally), and how to behave as a “lady.” We observe the gradual transformation of Nikita from scruffy street urchin to a head-turning eye-popping young woman – in the manner of Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion.
Nikita undergoes three years of training and is finally ready for “graduation.” Bob takes her out to a plush restaurant, ostensibly to celebrate her twenty-third birthday. There, however, she is handed a powerful handgun with two clips of titanium-tipped bullets and instructed to assassinate the man at the table behind her, who is accompanied by a lady and a guard. Bob instructs Nikita on the escape route and then leaves. Nikita tucks one clip in her bra and goes to work. In her chic black evening gown, Nikita methodically dispenses with the guard and the target and makes her way to the men’s room, where there is supposed to be a small window in the last stall through which she can escape. There, however, she discovers that the window has been bricked over. She has to improvise. She makes her way to the kitchen of the restaurant, but is soon cornered by about a half-dozen heavily armed security guards. She manages to down several of them but finally has to dive down a garbage shoot to evade a fireball from a rocket launched in her direction. She manages to get back to the training center and confronts Bob. She is furious that he already knew about the flaw in the escape plan and that it was all part of her final test.
Nikita is released into the “real” world and advised to take six months to establish her cover identity. She is given a new name, license, passport, and money. She rents an apartment and goes shopping for food at a supermarket – for likely the first time in her life. There she meets a soft-spoken young man, Marco (Jean-Hugues Anglade), at the checkout counter and takes an immediate shine to him. She invites him to her place for dinner, one thing leads to another, and, soon, the film skips forward six months, finding them living together in her flat. Nikita has discovered love for the first time in her life.
Inevitably, Nikita’s idyllic new life is shattered when she gets the call from Bob that signals her first assignment for “the company.” Over the last third of the film, we observe Nikita striving to balance the peculiar requirements of her “trade” and her love for Bob and their simple, straightforward life together. It’s bad enough that her job calls for her to assassinate unknown targets, but her assignments come without advanced warning at anytime of the night or day. For his part, Marco loves Nikita but has trouble dealing with her secretiveness about her past.
Themes and Values: Anne Parillaud is known to be something of a feminist. Given that a major element of the appeal of La Femme Nikita is the ferociously violent female character – a character type far more often identified with men – it's natural to pose the question as to whether this film is conveying a feminist message. As a male, I’m certainly in no position to claim to speak for feminism, but in my opinion, La Femme Nikita is not much of an advertisement for women’s liberation. While the post-training Nikita may be smart, powerful, lethal and nevertheless feminine, she is far from liberated. She is virtually enslaved to a male-dominated corrupt government and its institutionalized killing machine. She is empowered relative to her victims but powerless relative to her employer. She is prostituted, in a sense, but for death instead of sex. Moreover, I don’t believe that feminism advocates using femininity (in the traditional sense of dolled-up beauty) for manipulative purposes, because when women trade off sexiness for strategic advantage, it inherently reinforces their being treating as sex objects by men. If there’s a feminist message in La Femme Nikita, I’d say that it derives from Nikita representing one more example (albeit not a realistic example) of the exploitation of women. I was curious, given that some attribute a feminist message to this film, as to whether men and women react differently to it. According to the Internet Movie Database, females under 18 rate La Femme Nikita lower than lads in the same age group, those 18-30 rate it the same as their male counterparts, and women over 30 rate it higher than males over 30. Go figure! Perhaps what is more telling is that about 89% of those rating the film were males. That suggests that violent action films appeal mainly to men even when the protagonist is a female.
More than one reviewer has suggested that this is a film about redemption. Nikita murdered an innocent policeman and must pay the price to redeem herself. I don’t buy it. Assassinating people at the orders of the government is not “redemption” in any sense – simply because the killing has been ordered by a supposedly “lawful” government. Nikita murdered a policeman and then has been pressured under threat to her life to kill repeatedly. Her sins are piling up. One by no means cancels the other. Some critics argue that Nikita develops a conscience – by falling in love with Marco and wanting to live a normal and decent life with him. She’s headed in that direction, but it’s all way too little and too late. She’s already sold her soul to the devil and, as a result, acquires Victor the Cleaner as her associate for the last job of the film. There is no moral message in this film and trying to make it have one is counterproductive. La Femme Nikita is just another action film catering to the prurient interest of audiences in violence.
Production Values: If the value of La Femme Nikita were a debate topic, I think I’d rather be assigned the adverse side of the argument. It would be a lot easier to build a case as to why this is not an especially good movie. You could begin by mentioning the multiple absurdities of the plot premise. You could comment on the moral shallowness of a protagonist supposedly “finding redemption” by assassinating unidentified people at the behest of a barbarous government. You could comment on the failure to explore or develop the relationship between Nikita and her “trainer”, Bob. You could decry the somewhat ambiguous and less than satisfying ending. Somehow, though, La Femme Nikita holds the interest of most viewers despite all those problems. I think that its charm derives most especially from two things: the fascinating variation of the Pygmalion premise and the engaging performance in the lead role by Anne Parillaud. Personally, I’ll always overlook a flaw or two for a fascinating premise. The soundtrack, provided by Eric Serra, includes the song “The Dark Side of Time.”
I thought Anne Parillaud’s performance quite impressive. She certainly had an unusual degree of character development, from the spaced out druggie to the rebellious captive to the trained assassin to the young lover. She handled it all well, though the first two roles better than the last two. Parillaud’s resume also includes The Man in the Iron Mask (1998). Besson and Parillaud were in a relationship during the filming of La Femme Nikita and later married. The casting of Jeanne Moreau as the feminine mentor in La Femme Nikita was inspired. Moreau was once a world class beauty, appearing in such films as A Woman is a Woman (1960), La Notte (1961), Jules and Jim (1962), The Trial (1963), Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), and Chimes at Midnight (1966).
Jean-Hugues Anglade has often been typecast into roles calling for a low-testosterone, sensitive kind of man. His best roles were perhaps those in Betty Blue (1986) and Queen Margot (1996). I knew I had seen Tchéky Karyo in another film, but it was only after looking up his credits that I realized it was GoldenEye, where he was Dmitiri Mishkin. He was also in The Bear (1989) and The Patriot (2000). Next to Parillaud, the top performance, in my opinion, was turned in by Jean Reno, as Victor “The Cleaner”, in what amounts to a preview of his role as Léon in The Professional (1994).
Bottom-Line: One indication of how strong a premise underlies La Femme Nikita is that is has already been remade by Hollywood (as Point of No Return (1993), with Bridget Fonda) and transformed into a weekly dramatic series of cable television (La Femme Nikita). Neither of the American follow-ups is as successful as the original. I recommend going directly to the fine original. It adds a great premise to the standard mix of sex, violence, and action, resulting in a film that is a winner for a sizable segment of the movie-going populace. The film has attracted something of a cult following.
When you go shopping for this film, look for the MGM Special Edition DVD marketed in 1993 in preference to the older MGM DVD marketed in 1990. It provides a superior transfer and sound as well as better extras. The difference in cost at one site that I checked was just a buck. La Femme Nikita would undoubtedly warrant an R rating, were it rated, for lots of violence, profanity, and a bit of sexuality. La Femme Nikita is in French. Depending on which version you buy, you will have a variety of subtitle and dubbing options. The running time is 115 minutes.
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You might want to check out these other excellent films from France:
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