With Anna, Luc Besson self-parodyes to the point of ridicule [critique]

With this more or less admitted but failed remake of his Nikita, Luc Besson tries to impress with a staging that is far too mechanical. Hard, hard!

SO Luc Besson prepared a new version of Draculawith Caleb Landry-Jones fascinating actor DogManTF1 is rebroadcasting its penultimate production this Sunday, Annareleased in cinemas in summer 2019. The editorial staff of First was rather disappointed by the result…

Nikita, Joan of Arc, Angel-A, Lucy…and today Anna. Luc Besson didn't wait for the #MeToo sirens to put superheroes in full view. If the French mogul is suspected of having had “inappropriate behavior” with female collaborators, the presumption of innocence prevails without preventing one from seeing here a way of reaffirming one's fascination-obsession with female fighters. And therefore his respect for a sex which is in no way weak since it also wears fillers! Because more than fighters, the heroines of Besson's films are above all ultra-stylized dolls who send all kinds of boys to the mat without necessarily claiming the right to be anything other than action girls “who have them”. Not sure therefore that the statuesque Anna who uses her charms to deceive those around her will advance the cause. Nor back down for that matter. Let's move on.

Luc Besson talks about his great heroines: Lucy, Leeloo, Nikita, Mathilda…

A remake of Nikita

And the cinema in all this? He is there with his big hooves. After the space epic Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets and his relative commercial failure, Luc Besson, returns to earth with this barely disguised remake of his Nikita (1990). The story of a young and pretty 24-year-old Russian (played by model Sasha Luss) who, at the dawn of the 90s, will find herself stuck between the Russian and American secret services. Unless it's the other way around and the KGB and the CIA are bamboozled by this superheroine. Anna, on a mission between Moscow, Paris and Milan, will do everything to save her skin, her artichoke heart and why not, regain a chimerical freedom.

Valérian/The Fifth Element: Laureline in Leeloo's shadow

Too mechanical

By returning to the fundamentals of his cinema, Luc Besson intends to refloat his own flagship, EuropaCorp, which is taking on water from all sides. Why not, it is still necessary that the filmmaker who as a producer will have flooded the world market with supercharged and sponsored action films (the saga Taken notably) did not lose control too much. However, the falsely complex structure of this spy film, which systematically multiplies the back and forth in time to suggest a trompe-l'oeil world, is far too mechanical to create an illusion and hardly masks the deficiencies of a clumsy scenario. Why, for example, set its plot in the 90s on the still burning ashes of a Cold War that has become a movie cliché? The paranoia of the world of yesterday has nothing to envy of that of a present which demands that we immerse ourselves in it body and soul. Besson acts as if action cinema had not evolved in nearly 30 years and his Nikita. Worse, he wipes his feet on a political context from which he only extracts caricatured motifs: the smart and rigid Russians (poor Helen Mirren), the smart Westerners itou, but cooler (Cillian Murphy in minimum service).

Nerdy aesthetic

The filmmaker forces the line each time as if he was afraid of not making himself understood. All the adventures accumulate without any real logic other than to impress the viewer. In vain. As for the characters, too articulate puppets, the film doesn't even try to make them exist. And this Anna quickly takes on the appearance of a very long video clip with a cheesy aesthetic having nothing other to offer than the skin of its superheroine, nevertheless campy with beautiful energy by Sasha Luss.

Dismissal for Luc Besson, Sand Van Roy seizes the European Court of Human Rights