Anna

Model Behaviour

Anna
France/USA 2019
Directed by Luc Besson
UK cinema release print

Anna is a new action picture written and directed by Luc Besson. Someone who I used to trust a fair amount to get stuff like this mostly right although I have, it has to be said, been disappointed by a lot of his output of recent years.

I remember seeing his film Nikita with my best friend (no longer with me, alas) at the once great Lumiere cinema (also no longer with us) back in 1990. I think we went back more or less every week it was playing there to have another look at it. I saw it five times on their massive screen, if memory serves. The trailer for Anna looked very much like it was a differently dressed up revisiting of the themes and style of action of Nikita and, now I’ve got a look at it in my local, it has to be said, that’s exactly what it is... more or less.

It also has a lot less of an edge to it, it seems to me, than not only the glowingly brilliant original film but also of many of the retreads of the same material, some self-admittedly remakes and some not, by other director and writing teams. Films like The Villainess (reviewed here) have a lot more going for them than this. I don’t know why but the action sequences in this are just... okay... and the pauses between them seem a little less interesting than they could be. Films like Atomic Blonde and the John Wick series, for example, have a lot more kinetic brutality to their set sequences and, although Besson almost invented this hyper-stylised action world himself... by way of influence on other film-makers at the very least... you get the feeling that the action in this could be a lot more in your face than what we have here.

Besson has tried to compensate, somewhat, for the clichés inherent in this tale of a government created assassin in the way he’s given her a background incorporating a love of Matryoshka, Russian nesting dolls, which in turn defines the narrative structure of the piece (which almost lost me at the start because one of the timeline placements didn’t quite make sense to me as I was trying to do the maths in my brain). So what he does is he will have a sequence with what I am assuming is supposed to be a surprising ending, followed by a flashback from some years earlier which shows you how you got to that point in the narrative. And he keeps doing this all the way through and, although it’s a clever way of presenting the story, it does get quite old rather quickly and, much worse, tips you off before any real surprises or revelations about the state or allegiances of various characters are revealed. There’s a bit near the end, for example, when I couldn’t believe that Besson was being arrogant enough to try and fool his audience with the death of one of the characters when it was obvious it was going to be revealed as a staged moment a little later on in the narrative. I did feel quite insulted, in a way, that the director would think people would fall for this stuff.

Okay, so there are some nice things in this film too and a big plus is the strength of the performances. Sasha Luss is brilliant in the title role and she is doing very well holding her own against such strong actors as Helen Mirren, Cillian Murphy and Luke Evans. Actually, this really is a good role for Murphy and I’m convinced, by the way he plays this one here, that he would be an absolutely perfect fit for the straw haired Felix Leiter of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, next time they need to change the current actor portraying him in the movies. There’s also a wonderful performance by first time actress Lera Abova as one of Anna’s many lovers but, alas, as wonderful as she is in this movie, the character is somewhat poorly treated throughout and definitely underused, it has to be said. An epilogue to the main narrative giving us some closure about her would have helped, I think.

The other good thing here is the return of Eric Serra as the composer of the film’s score. This is a nicely appropriate piece of scoring with the exact same kind of soundscape you would expect from him... which is handy if you’re doing a ‘less than honest’ remake of Nikita, I guess. I hope this score gets a proper CD release at some point rather than just a stupidly flattened out electronic download affair as I really want to hear this one away from the visuals. This composer certainly hasn’t lost his touch over the decades, that’s for sure.

Ultimately, Anna is a fairly fun time at the pictures but it's hampered by a clever but somewhat impractical structure which, I suspect, dictated how some of the dramatic beats were allowed to fall and sacrificed a possibly more fulfilling experience in the pursuit of its own narrative experiment. It’s still, however, a very competent, polished piece of action cinema but I can’t help but be reminded of one of the earliest and most commonly found pieces of negative criticism of Luc Besson’s work back in the 1980s and 90s when his masterpieces such as Subway, The Big Blue and Nikita were first doing the rounds. It was said that he was a champion of ‘style over substance’ in his movies and, although none of us teenage kids saw this as a problem at the time... and in hindsight I’d still reject that proposition of a summation of his early works... I would say that his recent films such as the terrible Lucy (reviewed here), the so so Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (reviewed here) and this one are seeming to me more like films that totally justify that criticism but, in the worst way. Style over substance can be fine in my book but it needs to show us something either very beautiful or very different to make an impression in these media heavy, visually saturated times and, although Anna feels like it’s almost getting there, it wouldn’t be one I’d recommend to fans of Besson’s earlier works, I’m sad to say.