Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Nikita
1990 · Luc Besson · Nikita on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how jagged the camera is in the opening raid. (camera)
Thierry Arbogast shoots the pharmacy robbery disorienting and unstable. As the state works on Nikita, the camera settles: cleaner compositions, smoother moves, more elegance in every later sequence.
Payoff: The shooting style is doing the same job as the training. You can watch her being civilized in the framing.
Look at the blue shadows and the backlit surfaces. (light)
The palette runs cool and blue with warm sodium-lit interiors cut into it. Compositions are graphic and clean, and the image often carries the saturated sheen of a commercial rather than of a room.
Payoff: The whole world here has the finish of a designed object, which is exactly what Nikita is being turned into.
Notice that every scene happens inside someone else's building. (staging)
The training center, the restaurant, the apartment she is given, the embassy. Besson builds each as a separate sealed world with its own design language, and Nikita never owns any of them.
Payoff: She is always operating inside an arrangement somebody else drew, and the staging says so before the plot does. In the reading: the closed set (cadre). The reading calls each of these a closed set: a controlled, composed system that the person inside it did not build.
Listen for the synthesizer melody during the violent scenes. (sound)
Eric Serra scores Nikita's inner state rather than the adrenaline of the action. The recurring electronic figure is melancholy, and it keeps playing under gunfire instead of pushing it.
Payoff: The shooting arrives with sadness attached instead of excitement, which is why the kills never read as wins.
Watch her being taught to hold a fork and walk. (performance)
Jeanne Moreau drills her in how to sit, smile, dress, and move, as if femininity were a discipline with a syllabus. Parillaud plays the drilled body and the animal underneath at the same time.
Payoff: Two bodies are visible in every later scene: the one that was trained and the one it was laid over.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the doors and windows. Nikita is always inside a building that somebody else designed.