First things first, I’m writing this with reference to the US, cut version of the film (the version you’ll see if you rent it). There’s plenty of stuff around that deals with the uncut European film but that’s for another day.
Luc Besson makes the films Steven Spielberg should have made. Besson invests bleakness and tragedy into the world of childlike wonder that Spielberg’s movies inhabit. In Léon, we’re given this world when the paths of Léon played by Jean Reno, an Italian hit-man, and Mathilda, a 12 year old truant played by Natalie Portman, cross.
Mathilda returns from a trip to the shops, just late enough to miss the massacre of her family at the hands of bent cop Stansfield (Oldman). Desperate, she knocks on Leon’s door. The transactional quality of their meeting, the obligation of responsibility that is created when he saves her life in this way, forms the foundations of a complex and fascinating relationship. Spielberg would have been proud of the cleansing, white light that Besson floods into the face of Mathilda as Léon finally opens his door to her, and the finely crafted balance that is forged between the two as this happens.
The story from here owes more to the film’s European roots than any Hollywood formula. The key events are genuinely the exchanges between Léon and Mathilda, making the details that eventually lead to the finale, involving Stansfield, really secondary. Besson, correctly, gives them that role. What engages most is the curious nature of Léon and Mathilda’s hold over one another. He is the child, she the product of experience through bruised youth. Leon drinks milk constantly, a symbolist nod to his innocence and vulnerability. He takes a shower to wash the blood away after an assassination, but Besson slows the images, tracking the water running down his head, and the whole scene is more like a baptism.
The relationship here is a love affair, and a beautiful one. The cuts made to this version mean that the affair is sexy in an inferred way, something I would guess is of benefit to the film (but it would nice if we got to choose which version we see). This aspect of the film probably accounts for its 18 certificate, although issues of censorship cloud any discussion of this poetic movie.
The showdown is spectacular, as good as anything through the nineties and Portman gives the best performance by a child actor I’ve seen. Léon is proof that Besson is made to make Hollywood films. If only all action movies were invested with such tenderness and as well observed as this. |
