Besson pre-empted Leon four years earlier with La Femme Nikita, which made a heroine of a prepossessing ex-junkie/French governmental assassin played by Anne Parillaud. Reconditioned, retrained and to all extents remodelled after her involvement in a disastrous pharmacy hold-up where a cop was killed, Nikita is the heroic side of the Manchurian Candidate theory that suggests a person can be reprogrammed to become an assassin. At first compliant due to gratitude at being rescued from the gutter, she takes to her new vocation as a clandestine killer for the government; she's an operative who's there to obey orders, not question them. (And this is of course an action movie - so there are some thrilling set pieces to get through before the morality of it is cast in doubt.) When the next enemy of the state she targets is a woman who has to be shot at relatively close range, la femme fatale starts to retreat from the implications of her work. Her controllers bring in old hand Jean Reno as a more professionally cold-blooded operative named Victor - though like Leon, whose paradoxical purity is that of an overgrown child who knows he only kills 'bad people', he styles himself as a 'cleaner'. Nikita owed more as a character to female dimestore fiction/comic-book secret agent Modesty Blaise than to a realistic figure like the Jackal. Despite taking off for a life of anonymity when the moral contradictions proved too much, her seductively lethal exploits would also fill a Hollywood remake: Point Of No Return, with Bridget Fonda as the reprogrammed junkie femme and Harvey Keitel as the cleaner she kills before disappearing from the life. The character also became the focus of a Canadian cult TV series of the same name, which softened both her lowlife origins and her homicidal aptitude. In the later US TV spin-off, Nikita, the female assassin returns to infiltrate the organisation which first trained her in black ops. As outlandish as these latter-day pulp scenarios are, they maintain the archetype of the fictional political assassin: any icy-cool passion will be channelled strictly into the assassination itself, or the assassins subsequent flight from the consequences; the political impetus behind the hit is strictly the business of the controllers or paymasters.
Writer/editor/ghost-writer transfixed by crime, cinema and the serrated edges of popular culture. Those similarly afflicted are invited to make contact.
