Cinema du look in general is usually defined to an urban setting and portrays cities as dangerous places, as is the case of Nikita which is set around the streets of Paris. As Nikita is leaving the compound after her training she says to Bob she is afraid, this is unsurprising as she spent 2 years the in center.
The style of cinema du look means that style has a tendency to take precedence over content and the visual style is very extreme, for example in the use of colours. The colours and lighting play a big part in giving the films an image similar to and influenced by television adverts and music videos and this is may be why they remain so popular amongst young people. The opening scene is bathed in a blue light for example and during the shoot out with the police, the lighting is used to present 2 different sides, Nikita and her friends are shown in blue in the pharmacy whilst the police are outside with the red flashing lights of the police car. At one point a policeman looks through his gun and we see everything in an infra-red light with numbers at the top of the screen and an arrow to aim with, this gives the film an almost computer game-like affect.
Another aspect, which ties in with the directors directly targeting a young audience, is the way the films contain spectacular visual affects. In Nikita when the protagonist is left on her first mission, Bob tests her by telling her of an escape route that is infact walled up. When she discovers this she runs towards the kitchen and escapes down rubbish shoot escaping with inches to spare before a bodyguard of the victim shoots a large rocket into the room exploding everything. The language of the films is often colloquial in order to appeal to its younger target audience and sometimes uses English words. When the woman Nikita meets outside a jewelry shop gives her information she then says ‘see you later’ as she leaves and the whole of Besson’s successful film Leon, set in New York, is spoken in English.
In Cinema du look, there is also a cinephile tendency to cite from other films. When Nikita walks up the stairs to see Amande, the surrogate mother figure whose job it is to teach Nikita the art of femininity, we see a shot of her legs. This could be a nod to the films of François Truffaut who deliberately focused on women’s legs in order to fragment and fetish them. The use of lighting, blue, green and infrared in the films opening credits also refers back to Jean-Luc Goddard’s symbolic use of filters in the 1963 film Le Mépris.
The films main character, Nikita, is a perfect example of an ‘alienated individual within a fragmented and threatening society’, typical of cinema du look. She is all alone in the world because her friends were killed in the shoot out and at her death by lethal injection she calls out for her mother who isn’t there. Those in authority are portrayed as ruthless for whom morality has no place in their world. Nikita on the other hand evolves into something more than the psychopathic tool her masters thought they had created. She develops into an independent and self-respecting young woman. She will perform the tasks set her but on her own terms. Besson is questioning the nature of society and the place of the individual within that society and showing us just how much potential do we have for growth and development.
The characters in cinema du look films don’t fit into society but then the society depicted is extreme and fictional, with the government assassinating people and the death penalty being reintroduced. As are the actions and reactions of the characters extreme, when Nikita first wakes up in the training centre she tries to escape by hitting Bob over the head with a chair, then to make sure she doesn’t try to escape again he shoots her in the leg.
Although in Nikita the character at times becomes a parody of the feminine ‘ideal’, a beautiful nurse which is her cover-up job and in the supermarket when she tries to be the ‘housewife’ as she follows another woman around the supermarket picking the same products because she doesn’t know what to chose herself.
Because Nikita is no longer the male ‘outlaw’ and has been transformed into the femme fatale she needs a love interest that comes typically with cinema du look, for example in Le Grand Bleu, Subway and 37,2 dégres Le matin. This comes in the form of Marco a supermarket worker she meets on her first trip to the supermarket and who then moves in and becomes her fiancé. The romance serves as a norm against which the extraordinary lives of the main characters unfolds.
A theme typical to cinema du look is that of stylized violence and this is a theme that runs throughout the film usually in the form of shooting, at the start in the pharmacy and every time Nikita is requested to go on a mission. Another violent scene is when she has first been arrested and the policeman is interviewing her and she stabs a pencil through his hand, this could be said to be violence for the sake of it.
The flashy but hollow style means the characters tend not to have a history and there is little in the way of character development, aside from Nikita’s feminine transformation. As with Nikita we are never given a rationale for her ‘missions’ nor for her abusive, violent behavior and drug addiction and as Marco points out she has no friends or relatives, only the fictional Uncle Bob.
The film makes great use of tracking shots, in the opening scene, for example, where we see a wet road glistening which then pans up to 4 punks one of whom is dragging a body behind him. Also when Marco, Nikita’s fiancé, enters their apartment the camera pans as he enters the door and then tracks him through the room.
Cinema du look is postmodern as it fetishes the protagonist, Nikita starts off as a violent drug addict but by the time Bob has finished with her, her violent temperament has been ‘tamed’ to make her into the secret police’s top hit man. This is also a postmodern out take because in using a female main character in such an unfeminine situation it allows Besson to play on the typical gender roles. Although at the end of the film the usual orthodox gender roles fall back into place with the arrival of the brutal Victor to sort out the problem.
Music plays a big role in films of cinema du look, the soundtracks usually appeal to a young audience and this, added to the style of the films means that they could often be mistaken for a music video and Nikita is no exception. Besson uses his friend Eric Serra for the soundtracks to all his films and he brings atmospheric music which helps to set the mood for the scenes. When Nikita is looking at herself in the mirror and applying makeup she seems to be suddenly realising for the first time that there is a woman inside her and not just the tomboyish front that she puts on to the outside world and the music reflects the discovery. The effect is also exemplified at the very start of the film when the 4 youths are walking in time with the music towards the pharmacy, the scene could almost be from a rock music video.
Although the genre of cinema du look is said to be escapist and therefore wholly unrealistic and unrelated to the real life of young people it is in a way very representative of the youth of the nation. The success of films du look represent the need of the young people of the 80s and 90s to leave behind their lives for a few hours and take their minds off the pressures of everyday postindustrial life. So even though Besson’s films and other films du look are accused of having a complete absence of political and social concerns the genre shows that the young people don’t want to be reminded of what’s going on in everyday life. This in itself is symbolic of the mood of the young people of the nation and gives the films du look a purpose and so they aren’t just ‘commercial and superficial’.
Bibliography:
French National Cinema Susan Hayward Routledge
French Film: Texts and Contexts Susan Haywood and Ginette Vincendeau
Contempory French Cinema An Introduction Guy Austin Manchester University Press
Luc Besson Susan Hayward Manchester University Press
