| DVD Roundup October 2003
 When Cheesecake Met Beefcake: The New Heroines
It could be argued that La Femme
Nikita is the original badass babe. Years before there was Buffy or Xena or
Sydney Bristow, Nikita was bringing some serious attitude to the screen.
Of course, there have always been strong female characters
in film and on TV, but very few of them have had the strength, independence, and attitude
of the current crop -- with the significant exception of Dianna Rigg's glorious Emma Peel
during her run on The Avengers.
Emma Peel was distinctly sexual in her skin-tight leather
catsuits, but she was not just window dressing. She was a martial artist and markswoman,
and very definitely her male partner's equal.
There were other strong women in the years that followed,
but even when they were based on strong characters -- such as Modesty Blaise
(1966), Wonder Woman (1974-79), and Red Sonja (1985) -- who dominated their
fictive realms (and their male counterpoints), some of their power always seemed to get
lost in the translation.
Luc Besson's 1991 film, La Femme Nikita, unleashed
the floodgates (although kudos must also be given to Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor in that
same year's Terminator 2: Judgment Day). Moody and eye-poppingly original, the
movie posed an interesting moral conundrum: Who was truly evil, the hapless junkie who
killed a police officer in a botched robbery attempt, or the government officials who
trained her to kill "enemies of the state" efficiently?
MGM's new La Femme Nikita (Special Edition) delivers
the film in wonderfully crisp, deeply saturated color and vastly improved Dolby Digital
5.1 surround.
The less said about the disastrous American remake, Point
of No Return, the better.
The Canadian-filmed syndicated TV series, at least as
presented in Warner Home Video's La Femme Nikita: The Complete First Season, turned
out to be a stylish, intelligent surprise. Starring the improbably beautiful Peta Wilson,
it took certain liberties with Besson's concept, changes that would have doomed the show
to lightweight status in the hands of a less accomplished creative team.
The biggest of these was changing Nikita from a feral
junkie capable of killing a cop without remorse to an unjustly convicted "street
person" who simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This premise
seems to jettison the moral ambiguity of the original film in classic TV series fashion
(got to have a completely sympathetic lead, after all), but series creators Joel Surnow,
John Cassar, and Robert Cochran still managed to hide a hefty little barb in it. While the
film concerned Nikita's development of a conscience as she became more
"civilized," the first episode of the series, while seeming to follow the film's
narrative arc, showed Nikita learning how -- and far more crucially when -- to
kill.
As the series develops over the first season, Nikita
becomes a phenomenally efficient anti-terrorism operative, but the essential conflict
remains: She is not completely happy about being good at what she so obviously does so
well.
In this, LFN hews pretty closely to the blueprint
for the bodacious-babe genre -- in some ways the subtext is always don't hate me
because I'm beautiful. It is a tad ironic, of course, since we watch these women in no
small part because the characters are beautiful, but the best of the bunch are most
successful in direct proportion to how well they play with that irony. Josh Whedon's Buffy
and Sam Raimi's Xena take high honors for doing so with high archness that skirts
campiness. LFN falls on the earnest side of the fence:
"A woman who looks like you and can kill . .
."
"I'm no killer!"
Well, maybe solidly on that side.
The big question remains whether or not the new crop of
bodacious babes is different from the old female heroines. In some ways, no. Film and
television heroes still have to be winners in the genetic lottery. With the exception of Xena's
Lucy Lawless, who is truly possessed of Amazonian stature, action heroines resemble runway
models more than they do athletes. Even in the midst of such "liberated" fare,
one simply cannot imagine a series about an unglamorous, intelligent female counterpoint
to A&E's superb Nero Wolfe (The Complete First Season now available as a
three-DVD set).
Titillation is a still a large portion of the pleasure.
Another question is whether the chicks-with-kick genre
represents a big change in media's portrayal of women or just a momentary shift in focus.
That remains to be seen. Linda Hamilton's absence from last summer's Terminator 3: The
Rise of the Machines might be an augury of shiftiness, but big Hollywood features are
notoriously retrograde. Dark Angel has been cancelled; Xena has ridden into
the mythic sunset; Buffy's creative team has finally driven a stake into the
series' heart (although not the franchise's, since Buffy's character will be incorporated
into next season's Angel). We will have to wait and see if there has been a
permanent change in the way heroines are presented on TV and in film.
I suspect the shift will prove permanent. Carrie Anne Moss
has been the best thing about The Matrix franchise, and Jennifer Garner's Elektra
completely overwhelmed Ben Affleck's Daredevil. The future looks bright for strong
female leads -- and why not? It's hard to keep a good woman down.
...Wes Phillips
wesp@hometheatersound.com |
