Are you prepared for a fash-assination?
Lady killers are this director’s thing — and it’s really getting pretty stale
If you had to distil Luc Besson’s career into four words it would be: If looks could kill. From his breakout hit La Femme Nikita in 1990 to the teenage assassin in Léon: The Professional, and a supercharged Scarlett Johansson in 2014’s Lucy, the French director has made a living presenting brilliant, beautiful women with whom men trifle at their peril.
That’s about all you need know of Anna Poliatova, played by Russian model Sasha Luss, whose only other role to date has been in Besson’s 2017 epic Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Anna is an orphan the KGB recruit in 1990. She finds herself caught between two dashing spymasters, played by Cillian Murphy (CIA) and Luke Evans (KGB).
She’s also under the command of KGB field chief Olga, played with great gusto by Helen Mirren, who has been busy with a late-career renaissance playing Russians (The Last Station, the upcoming Catherine the Great) or killers (RED, Hobbs & Shaw), and in this case both.
Besson yanks the action back and forth with a series of onscreen titles that are almost comic in their demands on the audience — three years earlier,
then three years later, then six months earlier, etc. And he doesn’t seem too concerned with historical verisimilitude: Aside from some period-appropriate cellphones, he gleefully ignores most chronological signposts, not least the fact that during the period in which Anna is set, the Soviet Union was sliding toward dissolution.
Instead, he focuses on the world of elite modelling, which is Anna’s cover for her Paris-based politically motivated killings (which I guess makes them fash-assinations). But in spite of how good she is at both jobs, you can tell her heart isn’t really in either line of work. Maybe it’s the way she casually beats up a bullying photographer during a shoot that runs long, or the fact that she starts to get sloppy with her slayings.
Along the way, Besson stuffs the movie with action sequences, not all of them strictly necessary. A car chase in Moscow in 1990 — no, wait, “three years earlier” means it’s 1987 — doesn’t really add to the story, although it does explain why Anna has had it up to here with undependable men. Meanwhile, what happens to Maud, Anna’s housemate-turned-girlfriend? We lose track of her during the chaos.
More appropriate — well, unless you have a problem with gratuitous violence — is Anna’s first KGB assignment, which takes place in a posh restaurant and shows her putting the “cut” in cutlery — she will fork you up before you can say “amuse bouche.” Later, she pulls off an escape from what must be at least three battalions of soldiers, a scene that could have been topped only if she’d turned to the camera at the end and intoned: “Your turn, John Wick.”
Anna will no doubt appeal to fans of Besson’s feminist thrillers — though their enjoyment may be marred by recent allegations of misconduct levelled against the director by a number of female actors and assistants.
You can also get a nice Cold War frisson from its retro vibe, which includes the rarity of an assassination montage set to 1987’s Need You Tonight by INXS.
But it also feels as though the filmmaker is spinning his wheels with yet another variation on a theme. Midway through the film, Anna asks a KGB bigwig (Eric Godon) for a promise to release her after five years’ service. He refuses, while noting that most agents don’t last that long anyway. Thirty years after Nikita, Besson’s career feels similarly trapped. cknight@postmedia.com twitter.com/chrisknightfilm