Léon: The Professional (1994)

Luc Besson’s Léon: The Professional came out in 1994 and while it’s not a sequel to his La Femme Nikita it is a kind of spinoff and the two films have lots of thematic affinities.

Both movies deal with professional killers, and with people for whom killing is a vocation rather a job. Besson took that same central idea and came up with two different stories which complement each other. La Femme Nikita deals with a young woman, Nikita, who is a vicious killer and is recruited by the French Government as an assassin. She is totally emotionally disconnected in every way. Léon: The Professional deals with a middle-aged man, Léon, a hitman who is also totally emotionally disconnected in every way.

Léon is a very successful hitman. He refers to himself as a cleaner. He has made a lot of money but lives in a grotty apartment. 12-year-old Mathilda (Natalie Portman) lives in the same building. Her home life is miserable. Her father is a dope dealer. Her entire family is wiped out by DEA agents led by an agent named Stansfield (Gary Oldman). Even by the standards of murderous corrupt cops Stansfield is a nasty piece of work. His fellow DEA officers are brutal thugs.

The DEA officers had intended to murder the whole family but Léon saves Mathilda.

Now he doesn’t know what to do with her. He knows nothing about kids. He doesn’t want a kid. He is a loner. And Mathilda knows what he does for a living. He should kill her. It would be safer. But he can’t. He’s an ethical hitman. He only kills people who are criminals anyway and he never kills women or children.

So he’s stuck with her.

Mathilda wants to learn to be a cleaner. She thinks it would be a cool way to make a living. And she wants revenge against her family’s killers. She’d like Léon to kill them but if he won’t she’s prepared to do the job herself. She just needs Léon to teach her to be an efficient killer. Léon begins her training. She learns quickly.

An emotional bond develops between these two troubled loners.

And eventually there will be a showdown with Stansfield, which is likely to end in a bloodbath (and it does).

This is in a sense a coming-of-age movie but not in a sexual sense. Mathilda’s childhood came to an abrupt blood-soaked end and she was hurled into the grown-up world. Not the regular grown-up world but a grown-up world of outsiders and crime and corrupt cops. It’s a lot for a 12-year-old to cope with but she doesn’t have much choice.

It’s also in a way a coming-of-age story for Léon, who is emotionally stunted and now has to deal with the fact that he is now responsible for a kid. As Mathilda tells him, he saved her life so now he’s responsible for her. Their emotional connection is dealt with in a very sensitive and touching way.

The original cut ran for 135 minutes. After negative responses at previews in the U.S. it was cut by 25 minutes. The theatrical release was the cut version. Besson prefers to call the longer version the Extended Version rather than the Director’s Cut.

The Extended Version would have been too much for mainstream American audiences to cope with, partly because it clearly shows Mathilda as an accessory to a series of murders and partly because it explores the relationship between Léon and Mathilda in greater depth.

It’s difficult to see why anyone would object to the Extended Version. There is absolutely no sex and no nudity and not the slightest suggestion of a sexual relationship between Léon and Mathilda. It is obvious that Mathilda has developed a major crush on Léon. She does some very serious flirting. Léon makes it very clear that nothing is going to happen between them.

The problem of course is that in the U.S. there always has been and always will a knee-jerk reaction to any movie that deals with human relationships in a grown-up complex way. Besson was undoubtedly wise to agree to the savage cuts for the U.S. theatrical release. The original cut is subtle and nuanced but the subtlety and the nuance would not have been appreciated by mainstream American critics.

I think the Extended Version is clearly the superior version.

Jean Reno is excellent. Léon is a killer but he really does have ethical standards, which is more than can be said for the law-enforcement officers in this tale. Léon is a tragic figure, a basically decent guy who has never been able to come to terms with life.

Natalie Portman is superb.

As for Gary Oldman, his clownish absurd performance almost sinks the movie (as he almost sank Besson's The Fifth Element).

There are some memorable action scenes.

Léon: The Professional is a great movie with a definite neo-noir vibe. Very highly recommended and a fine companion piece to La Femme Nikita.

The Fifth Element (1997)

To describe Luc Besson’s 1997 science fiction opus The Fifth Element as bizarre would be an understatement of monumental proportions.

The plot is nothing special but this movie is all about style over substance. I have no problems with that. I like movies that take that approach. Sometimes the style is the substance. That’s certainly the case here. Whether you will enjoy the style of this film is a matter of taste.

It begins in 1914 with an archaeologist in Egypt deciphering inscriptions. That’s when the aliens arrive and announce that the stones are no longer safe on Earth. The stones have something to do with an ultimate weapon for defeating evil. There are four stones. Each represents one of the elements - earth, air, fire and water. But the key is the fifth element.

Several centuries later Earth faces a terrifying undefeatable menace from space. Those aliens (the good aliens) promised to send the fifth element to us but their spaceship was destroyed by space pirates employed by the evil businessman/super criminal Zorg (Gary Oldman).

Some tissues samples are saved from the wrecked spacecraft and regenerated. The result is a strange but beautiful redhead named Leeloo (Milla Jovovich).

Leeloo is confined within an escape-proof isolation chamber from which she easily escapes. She ends up in the flying cab operated by Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis). He’s a retired special forces officer. Now he just wants to drive flying cabs. He doesn’t want trouble. He should hand Leeloo over to the cops when they order him to do so. But Leeloo seems so cute and helpless and nobody likes cops so he rescues her.

There is of course a secret to Leeloo. Crazy priest Cornelius (Ian Holm) has some idea what that secret is.

Huge amounts of mayhem follow, with Zorg and a bunch of disgruntled alien space pirates trying to get their hands on the stone. It builds to a climax on a report planet.

There are lots of explosions and gun battles.

One of the things that makes this movie interesting is that it was written and directed by a Frenchman, the cinematographer was French and the costumes were designed by a Frenchman. As a result this movie looks totally unlike any Hollywood science fiction movie. This is a very French science fiction movie.

Science fiction movies always predict the future wrongly and always get the aesthetics of the future totally wrong. Except maybe The Fifth Element. The people who made this movie were sure of one thing. Whatever the future was going to look like it was going to be crass and vulgar and an orgy of bad taste. Looking at the world today 27 years after the movie was made we certainly seem to be on track to making that prediction come true.

We are not going to get the uber-cool dystopian future of Blade Runner, but we might well get the bad taste on steroids future of The Fifth Element.

The costumes were designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier. Gaultier was notorious for designing clothes that no sane person would ever want to wear, except perhaps to a costume party with a bad taste theme. The staggering awfulness of Gaultier’s designs actually works well in a science fiction movie context. This is a future in which people dress like insane clowns at a fetish party.

Everything about the production design is overblown and vulgar beyond imagining.

Which does make it interesting.

There’s some staggeringly bad acting. I have no idea what Gary Oldman thought he was doing.

Bruce Willis on the other hand is excellent. He’s a Hero. A reluctant Hero perhaps, but a Hero. He’s cynical but fundamentally decent. He doesn’t let bad things happen to helpless girls. He might grumble but he’ll do his best to save them anyway. As for saving the world, yeah he’s in favour of that, but if you want to get him truly motivated present him with a cute helpless girl who needs to be rescued. Willis also has prodigious amounts of gruff charisma.

The movie’s biggest asset is Milla Jovovich. Playing an alien is tricky. You have to make an alien seem truly alien, someone who just doesn’t react in a normal human way. Jovovich does a great job at doing just that. She also has to be so adorable that even the most reluctant hero would risk his neck to save her. Jovovich takes adorableness to whole new levels here. Any man would be willing to sacrifice anything for such a girl. She’s also incredible amounts of fun to watch.

This is an incredibly bad movie, and yet in its deranged way it’s an incredibly good movie. It just depends on what mind-altering substances you’re consuming while watching it. There is so much about this movie that is so bad. But there’s so much that is so good. There’s just no other movie like it. It’s a badly flawed work of deranged visionary genius. For all its flaws it’s an absolute must-see movie and it’s highly recommended.

It also looks terrific on Blu-Ray.

La Femme Nikita (1990)

La Femme Nikita (the original French title is simply Nikita) is a 1990 spy thriller written and directed by Luc Besson but there’s a whole lot more going on in this movie.

Nikita (Anne Parillaud) runs with a street gang. They’re violent murderous thugs. Nikita is vicious and she’s a mess. After a robbery goes wrong she’s facing a life sentence for murder. Then she gets a second chance. She’s a dangerous psychotic but she’s good at killing people and she kills with hesitation or remorse. The government can always use people like that. She is given the chance to work for a government intelligence agency as an assassin.

She isn’t really given a choice.

The idea is far from original. It’s the basis for the greatest TV spy series of all time, Callan. Callan is the world’s worst soldier but he’s very good at killing. He is recruited as an assassin for the British Government. Like Nikita he accepts because he has no other options.

A great movie does not have to be based on an original idea. The best stories are very rarely original. The trick to making a great movie (and La Femme Nikita is a great movie) is to take an old idea and tell it well and give it some fresh twists. That’s what Besson does here.

Bob (Tchéky Karyo) has the job of training Nikita. It’s a challenge. Nikita does not like being told what to do. She has plenty of potential. She’s a natural killer. Eventually she is ready for a mission.

The movie follows her on several missions. This is a movie that can be approached as an action thriller and on that level it’s very good indeed. It has plenty of adrenalin-rush action scenes. It has plenty of suspense.

This is also however the story of a woman. A complicated woman. She becomes more complicated. While she’s learning to be an agent she is also learning to be a woman. She is learning to enjoy being a woman.

She is also learning that she wants things that other women want. She falls in love. Marco (Jean-Hugues Anglade) is a seriously nice guy. They would like to get married.

The problem is whether Nikita can have a normal life with a normal relationship with a man while also earning her living killing people. It’s not just the practical difficulties of keeping her two lives separate. She also has to deal with the fact that she kills people she has never met, people she has nothing against, simply because the government orders her to to do so. The government has turned her into a killing machine but human beings are not machines.

There are very obvious echoes of A Clockwork Orange. The government dealing with people who are seen as social problems by re-engineering their personalities.

And there is the same moral ambiguity. We come to feel sympathy for Alex in A Clockwork Orange but he is a vicious thug. Does that mean he no longer has the right to be himself? Does that give the government the right to change his personality? We come to feel sympathy for Nikita, but she was a vicious killer.

At the start of the movie Nikita is a 19-year-old juvenile delinquent who kills by instinct. She is not much more than a wild animal. It’s doubtful that she has ever given a second’s thought to this. Now she is a woman. She has grown up. But is murdering people for the government more moral than just murdering by instinct? Perhaps it is worse. Nikita has become a killer who is capable of thinking about what she does.

I like the fact that she is not a perfect killing machine. She cannot function that way. As a killing machine she develops malfunctions. At one point when things go wrong on a mission she just curls up in a corner sobbing. She has not only developed feelings, she has come to value her own life. She is now capable of experiencing fear, and panic.

Anne Parillaud is extraordinary. She manages, quite subtly, to get across to us that Nikita is not a whole new person. She now dresses exquisitely but she is not really a super-confident sophisticated woman of the world. This is just a mask that she wears. She is not really an ice-cold professional killer. This is just another mask that she wears. The messed-up juvenile delinquent is still there underneath. And the frightened confused little girl that she once was is still there underneath as well. So we’re seeing an actress playing a woman who is herself like an actress playing a part.

Jean-Hugues Anglade is extremely well. Bob is a swine who manipulates Nikita but he is perhaps not entirely a machine either. He may feel some emotional attachment to Nikita. We’re not quite sure. Perhaps he is not sure either. A spy’s life is based on lies and deception. Sometimes they can no longer separate the lies from the reality and can no longer distinguish between the masks they wear and the person underneath.

Luc Besson was associated with the so-called “Cinéma du look” movement. Any accusation that Besson favours style over substance can be dismissed in the case of La Femme Nikita. It has plenty of style and plenty of substance. It’s a superior thriller but it’s also a complex look at the life of a complex woman. Very highly recommended.