Screen
Alleva, Richard
and marked passages. My own counsel at present would be for American Catholics (and kindred souls) to reread their Vitoria, who sought to warn his fellow Spaniards, as they embarked for America,...
...A drug-polluted near-zombie who can only mutter "gotta have it" (a fix), she allows herself to be dragged by her equally abysmal cohorts into their burglary of a pharmacy...
...But later, when a fellow agent with whom Nikita has worked closely and whose humanity she cannot deny is butchered in her presence, the blood seems to drench us while Nikita cowers in a coiner...
...At last, she is La Femme Nikita...
...Femme, with its manifold connotations of elegance, grace, seductiveness, and/or wifely dignity, seems to have no application whatever to the Nikita we meet at the beginning of the movie...
...One of the officers was killed by Nikita, and her unquenchably violent behavior under interrogation and during her trial is the very thing that gets her off the judicial hook...
...Nikita is played by Anne Parillaud...
...This moral terror permeates a film which is also filled with the physical terror that any good espionage movie must have...
...After four years of training, Nildta's head is clear, her body fit, her exterior chic, her senses alive...
...What was wanting in our recent political debate was sound political judgment...
...As the movie progresses, she becomes more and more aware of the contradiction that she is, and she starts to crack under fire...
...If you think that Nikita's case is too special to apply to common humanity, consider the insistence of military leaders (a sincere insistence, I'm sure) that they don't want stupid, ill-educated recruits going into battle...
...Mentally, we cower with her...
...Isn't there ever--there...
...If you accept those two definitions even as only partial ones, then what military leaders demand of the intelligent soldier is that he or she be a living, anguished paradox...
...Readers of spy fiction by le Carr6 and Len Deighton are familiar with the perception of espionage as the dreadful girder of society, but La Femme Nikita amplifies this perception by showing us a literally hopeless murderess restored to humanity precisely so that her murderousness may be perpetuated for the sake of (Western-world) humanity...
...As he walks from one room to the next, the obligatory faint noises in the background work on our nerves along with our knowledge that half the characters in this film are killers and one of them is bound to leap out and eat this poor kid...
...is called), spotting a potentially ace assassin in the girl, spirits her out of prison and starts training her in various lethal skills...
...To the role of her trainer and not-quite-lover, Tcheky Karyo brings a serenity that is more frightening than any overt toughness could be...
...Any or all of those, I suppose, but Broadway has never been quite the pigeonhole that play sorters have imagined it to be...
...According to convention, this is the moment when we relax after giving the usual embarrassed laugh that acknowledges that, yes, the same damn cheap trick has worked again and we are nothing but Pavlovian pups...
...This time, the president will be unable to play the role ofarbitermundi...
...But the violence he stages is calibrated according to what is happening to Nikita's mind...
...A morally insensate murderess has become a lucid, life-cherishing assassin...
...When Marco is caressed by Nikita, we may feel as if we were watching a man being embraced by an affectionate python...
...Many of the same essays merited the criticism that Thomas More directed to the scholastic theology of his day: "Like milking a he-goat into a sieve...
...La Femme Nikita is the perfect title because it indicates the film's theme...
...When she shoots a woman from a high window, Besson doesn't move the camera in for a close-up of the victim...
...On balance, the theory failed the test of providing wise judgment...
...Then she opens her gift...
...Bob" tells her to wait until he has left before killing the well-dressed couple at the next table...
...Movies like Die Hard and The Terminator work you over...
...the way she slightly tips a plate on a cafeteria table when "Bob" refuses to give her a furlough from training and the tension of her entire body seems to flow fight into the seesaw motion of the plate...
...Some have therefore concluded that just-war theory is at fault...
...her terrified, hunched-shoulder invasion of an embassy while disguised as a male diplomat...
...Predictable...
...The commentaries on the war seemed as ambiguous and unconvincing as the judgments of priests in ancient Rome assigned to scan the entrails of sacrificial animals to predict the chances for military victory...
...her rag-doll dance of victory (to the strains of Mozart...
...Mule Bone may be a special case since it was produced by the Lincoln Center Theater, heavily financed by foundation grants, but it was at the Ethel Barrymore because the Lincoln Center's own main stage was filled by the long-running Six Degrees of Separation--a Broadway play, if I ever saw one...
...Ominous...
...A young man, Marco, the boyfriend of the eponymous heroine, enters his girl's seemingly empty apartment...
...Writer-director Luc Besson can stop your breathing any time he wants...
...A great performance...
...She is, in fact, the major source of the film's terror as well as the chief object of its pity...
...When will the menace jump out...
...It was familiar even when works like Death of a Salesman andA Streetcar Named Desire were Broadway hits, but no one ever knew precisely what it meant...
...La Femme Nikita works into you...
...Commercial...
...At this point in her career, Nikita is keeping her mental distance from the atrocities she commits and Besson makes us share her detachment...
...There have always been producers who took chances on unusual works--not good ones necessarily-that outsiders, with the wisdom of the uncommitted, could recognize as sure losers...
...Today, the same imperative of self-denial might counsel an uncommon American modesty about its role in the world...
...Taken by "Bob" to an elegant restaurant, she basks in its luxuriousness and serenely contemplates the gift-wrapped birthday present that "Bob" has placed on the table...
...And that's what Nikita is...
...He calls her name and receives no answer...
...Unlikely to disturb the patrons...
...The question of where to put the camera is always answered by Besson in reference to the moral stage his heroine has reached...
...But this time our nervousness isn't completely dispelled...
...SCREEN WORKING GIRL 'LA FEMME NIKITA' n old suspense-horror movie trick is used once again midway throughout the French thriller, La Femme Nikita, and once again it works, but this time with a significant difference...
...Come to think of it, most of the things I review are gone before my comments appear, but that is because much of the interesting work today is produced by nonprofit organizations for limited runs...
...You are zapped while you watch it and then find yourself, days later, actually thinking about this ultraviolent mutation of the James Bond genre...
...It's a pair of loaded, state-of-the-art handguns...
...She playfully jumps Marco and covers him with hugs and kisses...
...But one definition of an intelligent, civilized person may be this: the possessor of a consciousness that recognizes that other consciousnesses exist and are as precious as one's own...
...But, precisely in order to continue living, she must be willing to kill again for the masters who have resuscitated her life...
...And one definition of a soldier in combat may be this: someone who obliterates other consciousnesses under orders...
...It has thus been a fair test of just-war theory...
...For the present moment, unlike 1919 and 1945, is not the American moment...
...And that's the theme of the movie: entry or re-entry into civilization through the perpetration of uncivilized acts...
...It can't be because the lovely Nikita herself is the most industrious killer in the movie...
...It's happened...
...At last, she is an elegant woman and not a 372: Commonweal hopped-up slum rat...
...The fault appears to me, however, to lie with many of the theorists on both sides who seemed unable to see the war for the weapons, the cause for the casualties...
...after she takes out her karate teacher with some unorthodox moves...
...My own counsel at present would be for American Catholics (and kindred souls) to reread their Vitoria, who sought to warn his fellow Spaniards, as they embarked for America, to guard against the temptation to convert by coercion...
...Even now, with fewer and fewer plays on Broadway, there have been some odd creatures turning up and, for the most part, disappearing before I could get a review into print...
...This version of the play has been given a prologue and an epilogue by George Houston Bass, who according to a Playbill biography, is "responsible for melding the 1920s sensibilities of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston with those of the audience in the 1990s...
...Police arrive and the ensuing violence leaves several cops and all the criminals except Nikita dead...
...The controlled rawness of her acting makes everything she does here unforgettable and I intend the adjective to be taken almost literally...
...Perhaps the permanent crisis into which the world seems to be passing will yet call forth great theological judges, as preceding political crises did in the thought of Augustine, Aquinas, and Vitoria...
...The orchestration of Operation Desert Shield/Storm has been a test of American society, politically, militarily, and morally...
...When the distant body falls, it looks like a rag doll flopping over...
...In the new moment, the old international principle of sovereignty may be the warning America needs to recall from the just-war tradition...
...For Hurston, presumably, it was still another of the works in which she wanted to present black life anecdotally in black vernacular...
...for Hughes, a poet who shared Hurston's concern with black language, it may have been an opportunity to turn to theater, a dream that would continue to draw him for the rest of his life...
...Since seeing the film, my brain has been playing and replaying many of her best moments: her feral outcry in the court when she receives a life sentence...
...There are obvious reasons for this...
...The French secret service (or whatever the Gallic equivalent of the C.I.A...
...She is a killer who has learned to love life...
...But since an assassin must present a civilized front in order to escape detection and must use intelligence and discipline to carry out missions, Nikita's new masters also detoxify her, teach her computer science, and, through the Pygmalion offices of Jeanne Moreau, give her an education in what can still only be termed "the feminine graces...
...That means that he doctored the original 1 June 1991:373...
...Thrillers that provoke thought without curtailing physical excitement end up being called classic thrillers...
...The three plays I briefly consider here, however, were presumably hoping for old-fashioned Broadway success...
...RICHARD ALLEVA STAGE TO HATE OR NOT TO HATE 'MULE,' 'LA BETE' & 'I HATE HAMLET' or years, the phrase "Broadway play" has been a favorite pejorative in critical circles--academic ones, particularly...
...And, attracted as she is to her chief spymaster, "Bob," she has discovered or rediscovered sexual love...
...Mule Bone was written in 1930 by Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, a collaboration that dissolved in disagreement, and it did not find its way to the stage or the page for more than halfa century...
...But it's only Nikita playing a little joke on her lover...
...The tuition for Nikita's education has fallen due...
Vol. 118 • June 1991 • No. 11
