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.
Once you have seen it
Look at the bathroom window during the restaurant test. (staging)
She kills on a phoned command and runs for the promised exit. The window is bricked over. No gunfire, no speech, just solid masonry where the night air should be.
Payoff: The system's foresight is not in the next room. It is nowhere you can point to, and it sealed the exit before she got there. In the reading: out-of-field-absolute. The reading calls this an absolute out-of-field: a power outside the frame that no cut could locate, felt as a wall.
Watch Jean Reno's face while he works. (performance)
The cleaner arrives, handles the situation, and gives nothing away. Nikita's own trained composure runs on the same principle, a surface that reflects and never reveals what is behind it.
Payoff: A face that returns nothing is the professional's equipment here, and it is the opposite of the twitching face she started with. In the reading: reflexive-vs-intensive-face. The reading contrasts the reflecting face, smooth and giving nothing back, with the intensive face where feeling keeps breaking through.
Notice the cuts from domestic scenes straight into killing. (cutting)
Olivier Mauffroy cuts the film with music-video propulsion and no cushioning between registers. A kitchen with Marco becomes an assignment in one move, then back again, repeatedly.
Payoff: The two halves of her life are never allowed to sit apart, so neither one ever feels safe to be in.
Count how many missions she completes successfully. (structure)
She is made into someone whose perception turns instantly into action, and the machine works. She hits what she is aimed at, again and again, and her situation never changes because of it.
Payoff: This is an action film where acting perfectly liberates nobody. Every completed job only confirms who is holding her.
Carry this in: Watch the doors and windows. Nikita is always inside a building that somebody else designed.