In perhaps the most dicey case of separating art from the artist, Léon: The Professional‘s craft and genre excellence is as undeniable as the troublesome nature of its text. One of the best crime thrillers of the 1990s, which is leaving Netflix at the end of the month, Luc Besson‘s story about a hitman reluctantly accepting guardianship over a girl whose family was murdered by a crooked federal officer is as viscerally satisfying as it is emotionally potent. Featuring stand-out performances and slick action direction, The Professional fires on all cylinders, despite the deeply problematic background of Besson and the unsettling nonfictional element of a romance between an adult and a minor. If you can stomach these thorny undertones, the film rewards viewers with its style and gives Natalie Portman a breakout debut performance.
Luc Besson Uses ‘Léon: The Professional’ To Reinvent The Hitman Thriller
French director Luc Besson is associated with the cinema du look, a cinematic movement classified by film scholars as one that emphasizes style and spectacle over substance and narrative. This postmodern trend shared similarities to the MTV aesthetic in films popularized by Tony Scott and Michael Bay, films with fast-cutting, saturated colors, and lurid images. The most prominent filmmaker of cinema du look was Besson, whose flashy style is best exemplified in his 1990 spy thriller, La Femme Nikita. He advanced his cinematic language by combining his genre panache for a story with an unexpected heart in Léon: The Professional. Besson’s 1994 film follows the titular Léon (Jean Reno), a reclusive assassin working for a local mafia boss, Tony (Danny Aiello). His clinical approach to “cleaning” mirrors his mundane life, nurturing plants as if they’re his only friends. One day, a corrupt DEA agent, Norman Stansfield (Gary Oldman), raids his neighbor’s apartment and murders the entire family, except for one. The daughter, Mathilda (Portman), is out grocery shopping during the massacre and convinces Léon to shelter her.
Léon plays into many of the usual tropes of a contract killer in movies. He goes about his profession with the ease of a regular blue-collar job, expressing no sentimentality towards his targets. While he does murder for a living, he has a suppressed heart of gold, which is realized by a passion for a hobby or extracurricular activity, botany in Léon’s case. The character’s depiction as an illiterate gentle giant is cheeky on paper, and it sometimes translates on the screen, but Reno’s performance is soulfully understated enough to give Léon sincerity. On the other hand, Mathilda is an innocent child faced with the unthinkably dire circumstance of having her family killed. Having been raised in a troubled household, led by her abusive father (Michael Badalucco), she is anything but a guileless young girl, as she holds her own, skipping school and traversing through Little Italy.
The Troubling Connections to Luc Besson’s Personal Life in ‘Léon: The Professional’
With Léon’s training, Mathilda vows to avenge the murder of her younger brother, the only member of her family she had any affection for. It doesn’t take long for Léon and Mathilda to develop an unlikely bond, despite the hitman’s anxieties about going into business with a 12-year-old, or any person for that matter. From what we know about Besson’s personal life, the character arc of Mathilda’s crush on Léon, along with his gradual vulnerability toward her exuberant personality, feels less like a fantasy and more like a disturbing documentary. The Professional has seen a drastic critical and social reevaluation after sexual assault allegations were levied against the writer-director in 2018. Reading the film as an autobiographical text is not just the work of critics performing a form of armchair psychology, as Besson’s relationship with Maiwenn, an actor the director met when she was still a child makes the relationship between The Professional‘s adult authority figure and an innocent girl feel far too real.
Maiwenn met Besson when she was 12, and they began a romantic relationship upon turning 15. When she turned 16, Maiwenn gave birth to the 33-year-old Besson’s child. According to the actor, the writing of The Professional coincided with their romance, claiming “When Luc Besson did Léon, the story of a 13-year-old girl in love with an older man, it was very inspired by us.” With few exceptions, most critics and media voices failed to connect the text to Besson’s life, but today, in a post #MeToo environment, the allusions are hard to shake. The upsetting meta-textual component of the film is exacerbated by the Lolita-like treatment given to the Mathilda character. Her devil-may-care attitude towards becoming a trained killer also mirrors her salacious tendencies, as in one scene, she performs a rendition of Marilyn Monroe‘s seductive “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” routine for Léon. Another scene, cut from the initial U.S. release, shows Mathilda talking to Léon about losing her virginity to him. 30 years later, Portman now has complicated feelings towards her participation in the film and her “cringey” sexualized depiction.
Natalie Portman and the Cast of ‘Léon: The Professional’ Are Exceptional
While acknowledging the troubling implications of the text and condemning the alleged heinous acts by Luc Besson is necessary, completely dismissing the artistic merit of Léon : The Professional would be a disservice, especially to its outstanding performances. Making her acting debut at 12 years old, Natalie Portman bursts onto the screen with the spunk of a seasoned vet. Where most performances by children feel endlessly rehearsed, relying on the same tics and playing every scene on a single note, Portman gives Mathilda a versatile range of emotions and complexities, whose childlike enthusiasm is never too cutesy, nor is her strong-willed independence ever too steely. Gary Oldman, playing the deranged, drug-addicted DEA officer Stansfield, is having the time of his life. The performance breaks every rule regarding naturalistic acting, but his hostile cruelty is always truthful to the character. Jean Reno, first seen by American audiences in this film, uses the tropes of solitary hitmen to expand upon the titular character’s deep-seated pathos, revisiting a traumatic experience from a time when he had a lover in Italy. In essence, he trained himself to become a professional killer as a means to cleanse his broken heart.
Thanks to his glossy music video-informed style of filmmaking, Luc Besson, who later directed The Fifth Element and Lucy, appealed to Hollywood sensibilities. It was Léon : The Professional where Besson’s dazzling imagery and showy action choreography shined the most. Demonstrated in two virtuosic shootout scenes, Léon’s opening hit and the shootout in his apartment with Stansfield’s crew, Besson crafts a familiar set piece of Hollywood spectacle to the highest degree of proficiency. Operating alongside the gritty crime and combustible performance by Oldman is the unexpectedly heartfelt relationship between an alienated girl and a reticent assassin. Of course, the inspiration behind Léon and Mathilda’s sweet rapport is disgraceful, but to juggle both elements of the story with clarity and consistent levels of engagement is impressive. The film belongs to a distinct trend of the ’90s where irredeemable anti-heroes, like contract killers, could receive the utmost sympathy from viewers for their suppressed benevolence. Despite its outdated existence thematically, The Professional‘s innate genre craft is everlasting. Reckoning with the implications of art under shameful cirumstances is an unfortunate commonality in the film industry.
Léon: The Professional is currently available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.
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