Anna (2019)

Luc Besson's Anna arrives with the familiar contours of a Cold War spy thriller: a beautiful Russian recruit, a KGB handler, a CIA counterpart, and a fashion modeling cover that allows the heroine to move through Paris and Milan with lethal efficiency. The film has a female lead and a same-sex affair, but neither element is treated as an argument. The lesbian relationship functions as operational camouflage, a plot mechanism that keeps suspicion at bay. The movie has no interest in consciousness raising. It wants sleek surfaces, expensive clothing, and the sight of Sasha Luss dispatching enemies with a blank expression.

On the question of representation, the cast remains overwhelmingly white and European. A Russian lead and Western supporting players do not constitute a meaningful gesture toward inclusive casting. The feminist dimension is similarly thin. A woman with a gun offers surface-level girl-power optics, yet the camera treats her as a male-gaze femme fatale, and her sexuality is weaponized for the mission. Racial consciousness, climate concerns, anti-capitalist critique, body positivity, neurodivergence, and revisionist history are all absent. The fashion world is not indicted. It is merely a backdrop for espionage. Conventional model beauty is not challenged. It is the film's central visual currency.

Lecture energy is close to nonexistent. There is no sermon, no moral instruction, no plea for social reform. Besson delivers a slick genre exercise with nested timelines and double crosses, and it asks nothing of the audience beyond attention. The film does not lecture. It poses. That pose is occasionally diverting, but it carries little cultural weight. Anna is a modest artifact of progressive optics without progressive substance, a spy thriller that borrows the language of empowerment while keeping its gaze fixed on the same old surfaces.