DOUBLE FEATURE 11.27.20

BY: Daniel Fisher

This week’s Double Feature pairs two high-adrenalin flicks that feature strong female leads. Before 1990, the year Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita was released, action films rarely centered around a woman character. Thelma & Louise, Ridley Scott’s groundbreaking movie that literally put women in the driver’s seat of a traditionally male-led genre, came out a year after Nikita, so Besson was working in some relatively uncharted territory. 

Anne Parillaud, simply put, kicks some serious ass as the protagonist, who transforms from a junkie to a dangerous assassin. Nikita’s arc helps it transcend its time and its genre and gives it some real emotional heft. In the beginning she is a strung-out waste who elicits absolutely no sympathy, which is compounded after she kills a cop. After her three sequestered years of training, she is forced to reckon with herself and her past and the consequences of her former recklessness and indifference. She falls in love for the first time, but her circumstances make it impossible for it to succeed. If a man were in this role, it would be a radically different film, since the male lead in this genre is typically driven by revenge and rarely does much soul-searching. With Nikita, it is moving to watch Parillaud come of age under impossible circumstances that she brought upon herself, which ultimately prevent her from achieving true redemption. 

Despite the titular character of the film, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) belongs to Charlize Theron’s Furiosa, hands down. It was an ingenious and revolutionary choice for director George Miller to cast a female lead in one of the most famously male-dominated film franchises, which had centered around a lone warrior seeking revenge for the murder of his wife and child. Not to take away from Tom Hardy’s coolness, but Theron is the true hero in this barbaric, post-apocalyptic world. Like the characters in Thelma & Louise, Furiosa’s motivations have as much to do with her being a woman as anything else. Not only is she revolting against a patriarchal society, but she is also setting out to forge a new world centered around women. In doing so, Furiosa is also leaving the traditional male trappings of the action-adventure genre in the dust.