Nikita · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Remember the window. Nikita has just killed a stranger in a crowded restaurant on Bob's phoned command, and she bolts for the bathroom and the escape she was promised — and the window is bricked over. Solid masonry where there should be night air. It's the cruelest image in the film because it's the quietest. No gunfire, just the discovery that the state has been a move ahead the whole time, that there is no outside to the plan she lives inside. Watch Nikita through that bricked window and its whole architecture opens up.

Besson made an action thriller, and that's worth insisting on, because Gilles Deleuze built an entire theory of cinema on exactly the images Besson trades in. Deleuze's name for the thriller's engine is the action-image: a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, situation and act locked in a reflex he called the sensory-motor circuit. In its grand version — the large form — a vast situation bears down on a person until one decisive act transforms it. The whole apparatus of Centre 23 exists to install that circuit in Nikita's body. They make her a perfect actor in Deleuze's precise sense: someone whose perception discharges instantly into deed. And then Besson does something cruel with it. The circuit works flawlessly and it liberates nothing. She acts, and acts, and remains authored by someone else. The bricked window is the action-image discovering it has no world to change — only a plan to complete.

Go back to where she starts. The feral girl of the pharmacy raid — twitching, drugged, biting — isn't in any circuit yet. Deleuze would call her a creature of the impulse-image: not reason and reaction but raw appetite, compulsion, a body on a downward slope toward exhaustion or death. She belongs to what he called an originary world of pure drives erupting under the social surface, and the film's opening treats the drugstore as exactly that — a den, an animal lair. The state's whole project is to convert impulse into action: to take a thing that only craves and teach it to aim.

The teaching is where the film becomes strange, and where its finest Deleuzian idea lives. Nikita is remade not by lectures but by posture — how to hold a fork, walk in heels, smile, sit. Jeanne Moreau's Amande instructs her in femininity as if it were a martial discipline, a set of attitudes drilled into the flesh. Deleuze had a word for the body that carries a social relation in its very bearing: the gest, the attitude or posture that exposes a theatrical arrangement rather than acting it out. Femininity here is a gest — not who Nikita is but a role bolted onto her, a choreography of the 'made woman.' That's the film's true subject and its dark joke on My Fair Lady: the make-over as domination, womanhood as another uniform issued by the men who own her. Parillaud's achievement is that the wildness never fully leaves the poise. You watch two bodies at once — the drilled one and the animal it's laid over — and the gap between them is the performance.

This is why the enclosed spaces matter so much. Besson stages the film as a series of someone-else's-architectures: the clinical training center, the trap restaurant, the embassy bathroom. The frame in Nikita is a closed set in Deleuze's sense — a composed, controlled system she is always inside. And the bricked window names its horror exactly. Deleuze distinguished a relative out-of-field, the ordinary offscreen space next door, from an absolute out-of-field: a sense of something beyond the frame that can't be located anywhere in space. The state's foresight is that absolute outside. It isn't in the next room; it's everywhere and nowhere, having already sealed the exit before she reached it. Total control filmed as a wall.

The look serves all of this. Thierry Arbogast's cool, blue-shadowed surfaces — lacquered, backlit, borrowed from advertising — aren't mere gloss; they give the whole world the finish of a designed object, which is what Nikita has become. And the lineage is legible in every frame. The affectless professional calm of Jean Reno's cleaner, and of Nikita's own trained poise, comes straight from Melville's Le Samouraï — Deleuze would recognize that impassive, reflecting face, a contour that gives nothing back, the opposite of the trembling intensive face of feeling. The blue nocturnal rigor is Le Cercle Rouge restyled. The programmed-assassin engine is The Manchurian Candidate rerouted through a woman's subjectivity. Besson's specific invention was to weld these to the pop surfaces of Diva and his own Subway and make a new thing: the state melodrama as fashion object, coercion photographed like desire.

What did it seed? The entire modern female-assassin cycle — Léon, Point of No Return, the television series — descends from this fusion of lethal function and longed-for ordinary life. But the reason to rewatch it isn't the progeny. It's to feel the pressure Besson found inside the action-image itself: a genre built on the promise that acting changes your situation, turned against a woman who can act perfectly and change nothing. Watch the window. She never gets through it. She only, at the end, walks away from the building entirely — which is not the same as escaping.