Luc Besson’s ‘Anna’ Is Shooting Up the Netflix Top 10. Is It His Farewell to Gun-Toting Waifs?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Luc Besson made a movie where a beautiful, waifish young woman is also a gun-wielding badass with deadly physical prowess. To some degree or another (give or take some guns), this describes many of Besson’s most famous movies, whether the waif in question is a criminal (as in La Femme Nikita), an alien being (as in The Fifth Element), Joan of Arc (as in The Messenger), a science experiment (Lucy), or a child (as in The Professional). It also describes his less-famous movie Anna, which is currently the #1 movie in the Netflix Top 10, presumably in part because almost no one saw it during its 2019 theatrical release. 2024 audiences may be surprised to realize it co-stars recent Academy Award winner Cillian Murphy.

In some ways, Anna is the ultimate Besson movie, because it makes the fetishistic subtext into plain old text: Anna (Sasha Luss) isn’t just a covert assassin who looks like a sexy model; her character is undercover as an actual model in early 1990s Paris while working for the KGB (who recruit her from a dire domestic situation in Russia) and later the CIA (who subsequently recruit her from a dire KGB situation) and later… well, no need to spoil the movie’s convoluted but enjoyable time-twists. Around the midpoint of the movie, Besson intercuts Anna enduring a series of disguises (and humiliations) in her meat-market modeling career with her brutally efficient killings, scored to the INXS song “Need You Tonight.” She has sex with her agency bosses and she has sex with a fellow model. It’s all in the merciless business of exploitation, particularly of the bodily variety.

The commentary lands a little uncomfortably, given that multiple women have accused Besson of sexual misconduct; one particularly serious allegation moved forward legally in Besson’s native France, until a judge dismissed it in 2021. So while Besson hasn’t been convicted of anything, it’s difficult to ignore both the number and the severity of the accusations hanging over his career at this point. Anna is particularly fuzzy (and probably unknowable) about whether Besson is using the model angle to reckon with the exploitative business he participates in – his early movies were likened to fashion shoots, and that slick style remains to this day – or weirdly attempting to position himself on the right side of history by having Anna, say, beat up a disrespectful and verbally abusive fashion photographer. The purpose behind the movie’s two showcase action sequences, where Anna must shoot her way out of impossibly outnumbered situations (one in a restaurant and the other in KGB headquarters), is much clearer, for better or worse: Here’s Besson doing that thing he does. (It’s cool as hell, more than enough for a satisfying Netflix watch.)

When Anna does strike back at that photographer, she straddles him, taking pictures of his bloodied face, and at one point ordering him: “Now be a dog.” Five years later, this retroactively feels like a tease for Besson’s follow-up Dogman, which hit theaters last month and is now available on premium VOD – basically, it’s flopping in theaters just as Anna unexpectedly hits the higher reaches of the Netflix charts. Like Anna, Dogman is a Besson movie where the hero escapes a tortured, squalid existence to become a superhuman loner fighting against the world. Unlike most of Besson’s other movies, that hero isn’t a waifish beauty but a male weirdo: Douglas Munrow (Caleb Landry Jones) who suffers so much abuse as a child that he winds up losing the use of his legs and eventually commanding an army of stray dogs at his disposal, like a low-rent Batman villain.

Specifically, Douglas feels like Luc Besson getting himself Jokerfied, and given the combination of that reference point, this particular premise, and serial overactor Jones, it’s something of a miracle that Dogman is often interestingly weird rather than flat-out unbearable. As it turns out, Jones gives a soft-spoken performance that includes a lot of drag work, and considering how much self-pity is built into the role, he’s shockingly elegant. The movie itself… well, it’s pretty dopey, and only raises further questions about Besson’s self-image: Does he sincerely identity with the put-upon, isolated, gentle-of-spirit dog master who also can create unimaginable mayhem when crossed? Or is this a weird deflection of his own possible abuses? Or is it both?

Regardless, Dogman suggests that the days of Besson getting the money or the leeway to make a movie as exploitation-flirty and libidinous as Anna are well behind him. Anna’s period details are sketchy at best, but technically, it’s set around the time Besson was making a splash in international cinema; if any of his movies should inspire full-circle reflection, it’s this one (however unlikely that seems). Instead, it’s just one more Eurotrash blast.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Stream Anna on Netflix