Please enlighten me - various questions about the plot

Based on my own interpretation of the crappy plot - let me try to answer your questions:

1. Obviously the 4 moons seem to be associated to the "empire des loups" gang - though what it means is not explained at all in the movie.

2. Reno is not turkish, but considering that he has dark mediterranean looks, I supposed it could be assumed that his character is. Alternatively, we could simply assume that he has worked so long as a police officer on turkish related matters that he might have infiltrated the gang at some point or another.

3. That is a great question... Obviously they either started with the mind erasing bit and didnt know how to finish off the movie - or the other way round. Regardless this is bad patchwork. I havent read the original book but obviously the author is guilty of the same mistake.

4. Same answer as 3

5. Well in this case the plastic surgery seems to have taken place in anna's life well beyond the events in the movie. I dont recall any suggestion that the killer recognised her before they realised that she had changed her face.

6. Very powerful mind influencing drugs? (please give me some of those before my next exam) or just an excuse to justify the fact that this is a french movie in the first place? more bad writing here.

7. Big gang lord who trained her to become the hard-woman that she is.

You can find answer to your questions in the book. The film is an insult to a great work of fiction. Still, I'll give you the answers but if you are planning to read to book then dont proceed:

1- 4 moons represent the Turkish mafia who call themselves Golden Crescent. 3 moons represent the moons on the traditional Turkish flag -not the present-, the 4th moon, boss Ismail Kutsi adds as their symbol representing the Golden Crescent. Sema, having lost her memory, visualizes the 4 moons in her dreams, a memory of her past.

2- Worst thing about the film is that it takes a "noir" ending and turns it into a Hollywood kind of crap. In the book, Schiffer -J.Reno in the film- is a shady character, and you have no idea about his true color until the end. Schiffer is Golden Crescent's man in France, he has close relations with Turks, that's probably how he got the job.

3- Mind erasing is a separete story in the book which later eventually connects with the other. The only connection between two stories is Sema, the main character.

4- Sema is actually a drug courier for the Golden Crescent, in her last job, a major job that consists Uzbeks, Russians and Turks, she decides to feck the organization and runs away with the package. Ismail Kutsi sends after her his men, Grey Wolves.

5- Sema goes through estetic surgery, her new face isn't known by the Turkish mafia until they reach the surgent responsible for her operation, that's how they find out about her new face. After not being able to find her, they probably assumed she must went through surgery and started looking for surgents -doing illegal business- in paris.

6- Sema knows french because of her job as a drug courier, she is the mafia's contact in france.

7- Ismail Kutsi, leader of Golden Crescent, is an ultra-nationalist, an idealist and a businessman. He journeys throughout Turkey and takes poor village children under his custody. Of course he gets them trained in the way he wishes them to be, as brainwashed warriors ready to serve him and the national cause. Sema is one of those village children.


Mother Asia

to clear up the fact that the "secretary" (I assume you mean the woman with the police reports.. I doubt she's a secretary, though) recognized the sketch of Anna/Sema when the cop showed it to her.. Sema had her face changed *before* she had her mind erased. She was the perfect person to experiment on because
#1 she is presumed to be an illegal Turkish immagrant, and therefore presumed to have no contacts in Paris,
#2 she is in shock, making it easy to take advantage of her long enough to erase her memory,
#3 she has just had surgery to modify her face, meaning that even if she has contacts, no one will recognize her (though, admittedly, when they took her & experimented on her, they did not know if anyone knew that she had gotten the surgery), and
#4 supposedly she had a very mutable mind (though that's gained from dialogue in the movie, not gleaned intuitively).
I'm not sure if these things are less clear in the English version? I watched it in French with English subtitles (only because my boyfriend does not understand French), and it all made sense to me.. the only thing that I really "missed" was the four moons thing.. and that was until I realized that the necklaces that members carried had four moons as a symbol of the organization.
my only question is.. to the person that said that Anna muttered about 4 moons because her dreams were bringing her memory back to her...
you *do* realize that she was muttering about 4 moons *before* they erased her memory.. meaning that she was just in a severe state of shock, having decided to turn against this powerful organization, doing nothing to hide who she is besides altering her appearance (her general face shape still remains the same, really).. so she was "leaking" this tidbit of information.. that she's connected to this organization that uses 4 moons as their symbol. She was probably paranoid that they would find her, even as she sat in the police station.

Read the book. Same name. It's quite brillant, not as "hole-y" - all of this is explained there. I imagine it would have been impossible to recreate the complexity of the plot without leaving as many holes as you've described. The only thing that didn't ring so well for me was the epilogue, which seemed trite compared to the rest.