Anna (2019)

Synopsis

The voice on the phone tells the woman driver her cover’s been blown. So, she must be a spy, yes? In this intriguing opening montage, we gather we’re watching secret police arresting people in Moscow. A couple are plucked from their jobs. One is snagged off the street. One commits suicide before he can be taken. That first woman, urgently waiting in her car, trying to persuade guards to let her into the US embassy, looks up to see a huge truck heading her way. Another American woman is captured, tortured, and told she’s needed to deliver a message to her people.

Look for a key detail. But otherwise park all this, because it plays a part only much later.

Instead, now imagine you’re an attractive Russian woman, selling matryoshka dolls in a Moscow street market. A foreigner walks up, offers you a job as a model in Paris. What would you do? Seems dodgy, yes?

And yet, Anna Poliatova (Sasha Luss) gambles on the chance to leave her hard-scrabble life behind. She journeys to Paris, is immediately thrown into the modeling business, and in no time is one of the elites. She’s got a cushy life, a wealthy Russian boyfriend, and, you guessed it: another profession that has nothing to do with being a model. Last we see of the boyfriend.

You have to piece together Anna’s full story from the splintered timeline that Writer/Director Luc Besson tosses out for you. KGB agent Alex Tchenkov (Luke Evans) plucks her out of a life of deprivation and abuse. He has to convince his boss, hard-as-nails veteran Olga (Helen Mirren), to take her on. Olga is intrigued by the young woman and gives her over to Alex for training. With sheer guts and determination, she passes an outlandish graduation test through inventive Jackie-Chan-esque martial arts bravado.

Once she’s ready for deployment, Anna thinks she’s on a five-year contract. But when that illusion disappears, we root for Anna as she appears to be playing Olga and Alex and an FBI agent named Leonard Miller (Cillian Murphy) against each other. What’s she up to?

See It

It’s easy enough to brush off Anna as yet another action piece that’s “a story told before and better.” And indeed is it. But no one is trying to sell Anna as Citizen Caine, or even Besson’s earlier La Femme Nikita. Besides the anemic matryoshka doll metaphor, I don’t discern much subtext, no thesis about the forces of good and evil, West and East. It’s just meant to be a few hours of good fun. And it is.

Model-turned-actress Sasha Luss is just fine, whether playing the abused girlfriend, the elegant model, or the cold-as-ice assassin. She handles the action pieces with grace and confidence. In the end she’s the only character we really care about.

Helen Mirren as frumpy, chain-smoking Olga is a character that tilts toward caricature, but it’s always a delight to see her pull it off, right up to her aggrieved last line. Cillian Murphy is also a treat to watch as the FBI agent who is initially calm and self-assured but is gradually reduced to a wide-eyed schoolboy as Anna gets her hooks into him.

The fight scenes are stylishly, if unbelievably, choreographed. The trendy, fractured timeline unravels only passingly well, as there were multiple times when I had to consider where I was. In movies featuring models, you often get a montage of modeling gigs, but here we also get a montage of stylish assassinations. I suspect models will identify with the scene where Anna does what they all wish they could do to an asshole photographer. There’s even some humor in a bit about a missing finger.

All in all, it’s worth spending a few hours to get to the “how is she possibly going to get out of this” finale. Hit the Play button, dig into your popcorn, turn off your brain, and enjoy.