Anna

If Anna had been the work of some newcomer, there would have been great admiration for the cleverly written screenplay and solid directing. But for Luc Besson, it’s not all that astounding. The film rather looks like one of his genre flicks, which he had previously passed on to his younger collaborators. Perhaps it should have been handed off before his EuropaCorp was impacted by debts and Besson and his colleagues were forced to lay people off and sell the company’s subsidiaries. In the context of that part of Besson’s filmography, where he figures in as the creator of the theme, co-author of the screenplay and producer, Anna deservedly ranks highly as a precision-crafted variation on the masterwork Nikita, updated to a glossily more superficial form and made special by it outstanding screenplay, which after a certain amount of runtime always rotates the field of view, thus transforming the viewers’ perspective not only on events that they saw a moment ago, but also on the titular heroine. From an originally apathetic object, she first becomes a clever tool and then, after a few turns, she appears as a sophisticated manipulator and, primarily, a chess genius making plans numerous steps ahead of the viewer and the other characters. In addition to that, we have action scenes that do not deny the inspiration of Atomic Blonde, and even though the ambitious and causally designed choreography cannot come close to that of Atomic Blonde, they still offer a refreshing hyperkinetic physical spectacle. But then one remembers that this is an original work by the same man who was once able to do much more enthralling things with the characters of women who find themselves in the unwanted position of action heroines. In Nikita, he showed the world of spies as a ruthless and sordid place where the heroine desperately faces helplessness and, like a predatory beast, has to fight not only for her life, but above all else for her sanity and whatever remains of her innocence. In Lucy, on the other hand, Besson released the whole genre from the shackles of unnecessary rationality and let his heroine transform the connective tissue of reality/film and, through this destruction of rules, create a cyberpunk innovation that showed us how unnecessarily limited films are when they sacrifice imagination at the expense of believability. Besson was a filmmaker who enchanted viewers, cooked up modern-day fairy tales and thrilling fantasies, sought out poetry in the grimy corners of everyday environments, opened our hearts to hired killers and extra-terrestrial beings, and invited us to new worlds beyond the boundaries of our own imagination. If the publicists’ predictions come to pass and EuropaCorp is hit with bankruptcy and Besson by numerous accusations, Anna may paradoxically be his last battle for viewers. Perhaps Besson is a relic of another time and can no longer easily find an audience that is sufficiently in tune with his vision. Perhaps for today's audience, Anna can be a welcome refreshment and a good genre treat. For witnesses whose love for cinema was at least in part inspired by Besson’s early films, however, it is rather a sad denouement. (01/09/2019) (less) (more)