French Film Diary # 4 Le Femme Nikita

Laurie Troutman
Professor Larry Tung
French Cinema/Travel learn
April 10, 2007
Film Diary # 4


Le Femme Nikita

When I first heard of Le Femme Nikita, I thought of the television series that I saw on the USA network many years ago. However this Le Femme Nikita is directed by Luc Besson, and was the first out of all of them. It was an early 90’s French film, filled with action, drama, crime, and romance. In 1992 it was nominated for a Golden Globe for best foreign language film. Unfortunately it did not win, but it is considered a great thriller.
The film begins with Nikita, played by Anne Parillaud, breaking into a pharmacy. The pharmacy is owned by one of her friends father, that was with her at the time. Nikita was not known for being the best teenager. She was nineteen years old, doing drugs and robbing stores. Breaking into the pharmacy was not a good idea. A huge shoot out with the police happened and Nikita’s group of buddies got killed. Nikita was the only one left, and ended up shooting a cop in the throat.
Consequently Nikita was caught and was put on trial for murder. She was found guilty and will serve thirty years without parole. However that will soon change for Nikita. Nikita awakens in a suspicious room, and is now in supervision of the French Intelligence Agency. She was given a choice to either become apart of the DGSE (French Intelligence Agency), as an assassin, or be killed. Nikita then took a hour to make her decision.

She decided to join, and save her life. They would teach her how to walk, talk, read, and fight to serve her country.
Nikita is then given a whole new identity. She has to become a new person, and leave her old life behind. She’s given a new name, Josephine, money to get started and get a place to live. Nikita resists at first, but then becomes motivated by her trainer.
The scene where Nikita followed the women in the grocery store was one that stood out in my mind. Here Nikita bought everything this woman bought because she didn’t know what to buy, or know how to be an adult. As checking out in the grocery store she didn’t even know how to put the food on the belt, she started to just dump the food rapidly. The young man, Marco, just started there and helped her kindly. Nikita took him by surprise and ask him to dinner at her place. He was never asked out by a woman before, and was pleasantly surprised and intrigued.
After her first mission was complete she was then free to live with her boyfriend, soon to be fiancé. She was taken to a fancy restaurant, where she was dressed and made up properly. She learned how to put on makeup, how to dress, and feel like a woman. Nikita had to kill the people sitting behind her including the body guards and get out alive. She was told she can get out through a window located in the restaurant bathroom. However that wasn’t the case, it was blocked by a brick wall. This was a test to see if she can handle the situation. If she made it out alive, she passed the test and would continue with the next assignment.
Nikita made it out alive, still just barley. Her career continues, where her next mission is to recover documents from a foreign embassy. The assignment goes completely wrong, where she ends up needing the services of a cleaner to destroy all the evidence, including herself. She pulls it together and then dresses up as the ambassador, and enters the office to take pictures of documents through a camera on her glasses. A surveillance camera and a guide dog catches her in action. Nikita’s cleaner is then shot to death in the car as they try to leave the embassy. Things went wrong, and lives were ruined. She would have to leave Marco, and start her life over once again.
So therefore, even though it was Luc Besson’s first breakout film, it was an incredible movie, with a terrific ensemble cast. When a film is remade as another film and then a television series, something was done right. I really like this movie because I never knew what was going to happen next. Le Femme Nikita , seemed like a modern day American James Bond film in some way. I would definitely recommend it to others. The only thing I would have changed is the ending. I know you can’t always have a happy ending, but for her I would of like that. In the beginning of the film I didn’t really like Nikita, but I grew to like her, and wanted her to succeed in life.