La Femme Nikita-***1/2 (out of five) Killing Zoe-*** (out of five)
When DVD screeners of La Femme Nikita and Killing Zoe arrived simultaneously in my mailbox, I thought I had an angle for a piece: actor Jean-Hugues Anglade, a co-star in both films. I began making notes, asking myself how they fit into his oeuvre, and whether, viewed in tandem, these actioners demonstrate career progression.
That's when I realized: what I know about the work of Jean-Hugues Anglade you could fit on the head of a pin; I've only seen him in one other performance besides those mentioned above, as Zorg in Betty Blue (a.k.a. 37°2 le matin), a movie with obvious but ultimately insignificant parallels to La Femme Nikita. So how's this sound for a thematic compromise? Nikita (its native title) and Killing Zoe each take place in France--that's as good a link between them as Anglade.
But comparing them raises far more complex issues than that; Nikita is the product of a Francophone filmmaker's western sensibilities, while Killing Zoe was directed by Roger Avary, a Stateside bohemian using his first taste of indie cred (he had collaborated with Quentin Tarantino, to the tune of an Oscar, on Pulp Fiction's screenplay) to mount what is, for all intents and purposes, an arty heist film. Fascinatingly, the sum effects of La Femme Nikita and Killing Zoe are roughly equivalent, like mirror images, and either falls astray in act three, when Luc Besson and Avary, respectively, must finish what they started.
Nikita, in a wholly redundant turn of events, inspired Point of No Return, a mostly slavish US recreation featuring Bridget Fonda as Nikita, a junkie riot grrl converted, "Pygmalion"-style, into a gorgeous professional assassin. In the same role, non-English-speaking Anne Parillaud does it better--the heroine is of a certain Euro-comic super-babe tradition to begin with, and Parillaud carries herself more authentically conflicted than Fonda is even capable of.
Nikita, rehabilitated by an espionage-training program after shooting a cop in cold blood, is unleashed on the world with the understanding that she will occasionally carry out governmental hits. Which puts a crimp in her romantic life: she must keep new beau Marco (Anglade) in the dark about her profession, and as his feelings for her intensify, so do his suspicions that she's harbouring a thousand secrets. In one strangely poignant scene, Marco tries to engage Nikita in a conversation about love and trust while standing outside their bathroom door, and she doesn't respond for fear of breaking concentration on the sniper sight she's aiming at marks across the street.
My attention never fails to drift from Besson's first international smash when his film detours into James Bond mediocrity. As part of Nikita's training, she is subjected to a life-or-death test in which the only means of escape, a tiny window, has been sealed off by bricks, and, in executing Nikita, it's as if Besson encountered a similar dilemma. The 'domestic bliss-hired kill-domestic bliss again' structure could theoretically go on ad infinitum, thus some hard choices, concerning the botched kidnapping of a French ambassador, are imposed on Nikita in the homestretch, and rather clumsily so.
Too many characters are introduced at the last-minute, dividing our loyalties to the protagonist as we waste energy parsing the data on everybody else. And, let's face it, narrative complexity has never been Besson's strong suit; the imprecision of said late-period subplot resists audience involvement for an attention-damaging spell.
Though Nikita has difficulty getting back on its feet for the denouement, the final scene is ten times that of Point of No Return, which seems to have accidentally borrowed its closer from a different French production, Louis Malle's Damage. Likewise, Killing Zoe climaxes weakly but ends strongly; a lot of American convention screws up the second half of what was, for all intents and purposes, a very original motion picture.
Killing Zoe might be referencing the only good in Roman Polanski's Frantic during its warm-up shots, as we soar, from the car passenger's point of view, through Paris traffic. (Coincidentally, Besson would open his Leon, released the same year as Killing Zoe, in a similar manner.) Eventually, the camera turns around to face Zed (Eric Stoltz), a freshly landed American tourist. His cab driver offers the services of a prostitute, a gorgeous blonde waif named Zoe (Julie Delpy) who shows up later that evening to Zed's hotel. The two "Z"s develop a crush on one another.
Zed's old friend Eric (Anglade) eventually shows up at the hotel and bounces Zoe from the premises. Knowing Eric's mean streak, Zed does not protest, and before long he and Eric descend upon the Paris underground together. Avary is successful at cinematically approximating a drug haze, employing subtle camera tricks and weird soundtrack cues as Zed trips out on various illegal substances handed him.
Then, like Tarantino's From Dusk Till Dawn, the film radically switches gears: the morning after, Zed finds himself involved in a Savings-and-Loan robbery alongside Eric's gang of Besson-esque hoodlums. Little does anybody know that Zoe is a teller there by day, and her endangerment as a hostage is crosscut with ignorant Zed's progress in cracking the code to a basement vault. That godforsaken chestnut, the bank-job that backfires, is resurrected here; Killing Zoe becomes painfully routine in its dismantling of Eric's plan. However, I couldn't quite gauge its outcome, thanks to Avary's crafty plant that Eric is HIV-positive and therefore feels invincible.
Neither Nikita nor Zoe is lacking in imagination, per se: the common flaw between them is that they meet a cul-de-sac at the halfway point, and, after much scrambling, only recover from this in their epilogues. At least they also share uniformly terrific acting, especially from the two title women. (Parillaud won a Cesar, the French equivalent of an Oscar, for Nikita.) Then there's Anglade, Nikita's angel and Zoe's devil, an actor who makes everything he's in an improbable showcase for his charisma.
Fans, prepare to be slightly dismayed by yet another home video incarnation of La Femme Nikita. MGM steps up to the plate by delivering its new DVD 16x9-enhanced, and at last the aspect ratio is an accurate 2.35:1. (Some cassette and LaserDisc versions are letterboxed at 2.0:1 and under.) The image is pretty spectacular, to boot, if a tad edgy and oversaturated. No, what really perplexes this time around is the decision to remaster only the hilarious English dub in 5.1 Dolby Digital sound.
I found myself listening to the French Dolby Surround mix when people were talking and the English DD track when people were shooting. The biggest difference between them is bass, anyway: the English recording contains a whole lot more of it, which hardly matters to the dialogue scenes.
Killing Zoe owes its 16x9-enhanced, 1.85:1 letterboxed transfer to the fans, a vocal bunch when Artisan announced a full-frame release last year. I always thought the unmatted Killing Zoe looked terrible on VHS--dark, muddy, and brown. This disc restores shadow detail to Tom Richmond's cinematography, and Delpy's alabaster skin now stands out nicely from the strong (but controlled) colours. The Dolby Surround sound also strikes me as punchier on DVD than it did on tape, however it's not the orgy of low frequencies and sidewall imaging a modern movie rife with gunfire tends to be. Extras are sparse all around: Nikita comes with a theatrical trailer and an informative collector's booklet; Killing Zoe is an ever-so-slightly meatier package: its booklet and trailer are appended by on-screen cast/crew bios and production notes.
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