Leon. (15.)
Directed by Luc Besson. 1994.
Starring Jean Reno, Nathalie Portman, Gary Oldman and Danny Aiello. 110mins/ 133 mins.
Released on Blu-ray for its 20th anniversary, Leon now stands as the pinnacle of Besson’s career: the preceding films build up to it and what followed slide slowly downhill from it. This queasy and absurd tale of a simple minded assassin and his relationship with a 12 year old girl is an odd one to have as your career highpoint. Almost everything in is ridiculous or reprehensible, it takes unwise step after another yet it takes each unwise step with such confidence and panache it eases you free of the grasp of your better judgment.
Reno’s Leon is a simple minded brute who has been corrupted by his exposure to the cynical humanity in New York. Tony (Aiello) has shaped him to the ultimate killing machine and now sets him up with hits to perform as well as “looking after” his money for him. It works well until he takes pity on a neighbour from his block, a twelve year old girl Mathilda (Portman) whose family has just been slaughtered by rogue cop Oldman. He takes her in, saves her life and, at her insistence, trains her in the ways of a hired hitman.
The French film makers have traditionally had a love affair with American pulp, one they have usually expressed by talking all the way through it and taking all the fun out of it. Besson’s isn’t stuck up when it comes to action cinema, he’s not afraid of a bit of shoot’em up or fisticuffs and his approach is in many ways very American: shock and awe. His action scenes are very effective but they are expression of blunt indulgence, consistently sending in more men and using heavier weapons than the situation could possibly warrants.
So while you feel that Besson is pleased as punch to get a chance to film in the Big Apple, the Jerusalem of film making, his film is enormously, possibly inadvertently, anti-American. It’s view of the States is so wildly exaggerated as to be an insult: the script wants us to believe that a rogue cop can kill an entire family in their home and explain it away to the investigators as “doing his job”; that an assassin can toss around hand grenades in an apartment block and then slope off home unnoticed or that the previously mentioned rogue cop can co-opt the entire NYPD to help him bump off his enemy.
It also suggests that a European mass murderer is still morally superior to most Americans. Leon is cold blooded but soppy. As embodied by Reno, Leon is such a distinctive, iconic figure that Reno has been able to get work off it ever since. Besson’s real coup was casting the young Natalie Portman who is frightening assured and stays just this side of obnoxiously precocious. Oldman’s appearance is the first of his stupid baddy roles and though it is a ridiculous performance, it is exactly the ridiculous performance the script seems to call for and it gives a genuine menace into Besson’s overblown vision.
This disc gives you two version of the film. The one that was shown in cinemas in 1994 and a longer, original version, that Besson cut down after American test screening audiences reacted badly to some parts of. American test screening audiences have something of a pig-ignorant, philistine reputation – like an infinite number of TOWIE cast members on an infinite number of typewriters trying to type the works of Jackie Collins – yet they may have had a point here.
The relationship between Leon and Mathilda was always highly suspect but at the time it was generally summed up as being boldly ambiguous. It isn’t so ambiguous in the longer version. Mathilda romantic infatuation with Leon is made clear and Leon to some extent responds to it. The restored scenes included one where he takes her on a hit with him, a Russian roulette game and her dressing up for him as Madonna and Marilyn. Each one is a what-were-they-thing-of moment, and makes Kick Ass look like no big deal.
That it is Mathilda that is pushing for the relationship to become sexual is especially troubling, as this seems to echo the standard paedophile defence. Of course, in the film it can be explain as the twisted coping mechanism of a traumatised girl thrown into a hideous situation. But it could just be a dirty old man fantasy.
Directed by Luc Besson. 1994.
Starring Jean Reno, Nathalie Portman, Gary Oldman and Danny Aiello. 110mins/ 133 mins.
Released on Blu-ray for its 20th anniversary, Leon now stands as the pinnacle of Besson’s career: the preceding films build up to it and what followed slide slowly downhill from it. This queasy and absurd tale of a simple minded assassin and his relationship with a 12 year old girl is an odd one to have as your career highpoint. Almost everything in is ridiculous or reprehensible, it takes unwise step after another yet it takes each unwise step with such confidence and panache it eases you free of the grasp of your better judgment.
Reno’s Leon is a simple minded brute who has been corrupted by his exposure to the cynical humanity in New York. Tony (Aiello) has shaped him to the ultimate killing machine and now sets him up with hits to perform as well as “looking after” his money for him. It works well until he takes pity on a neighbour from his block, a twelve year old girl Mathilda (Portman) whose family has just been slaughtered by rogue cop Oldman. He takes her in, saves her life and, at her insistence, trains her in the ways of a hired hitman.
The French film makers have traditionally had a love affair with American pulp, one they have usually expressed by talking all the way through it and taking all the fun out of it. Besson’s isn’t stuck up when it comes to action cinema, he’s not afraid of a bit of shoot’em up or fisticuffs and his approach is in many ways very American: shock and awe. His action scenes are very effective but they are expression of blunt indulgence, consistently sending in more men and using heavier weapons than the situation could possibly warrants.
So while you feel that Besson is pleased as punch to get a chance to film in the Big Apple, the Jerusalem of film making, his film is enormously, possibly inadvertently, anti-American. It’s view of the States is so wildly exaggerated as to be an insult: the script wants us to believe that a rogue cop can kill an entire family in their home and explain it away to the investigators as “doing his job”; that an assassin can toss around hand grenades in an apartment block and then slope off home unnoticed or that the previously mentioned rogue cop can co-opt the entire NYPD to help him bump off his enemy.
It also suggests that a European mass murderer is still morally superior to most Americans. Leon is cold blooded but soppy. As embodied by Reno, Leon is such a distinctive, iconic figure that Reno has been able to get work off it ever since. Besson’s real coup was casting the young Natalie Portman who is frightening assured and stays just this side of obnoxiously precocious. Oldman’s appearance is the first of his stupid baddy roles and though it is a ridiculous performance, it is exactly the ridiculous performance the script seems to call for and it gives a genuine menace into Besson’s overblown vision.
This disc gives you two version of the film. The one that was shown in cinemas in 1994 and a longer, original version, that Besson cut down after American test screening audiences reacted badly to some parts of. American test screening audiences have something of a pig-ignorant, philistine reputation – like an infinite number of TOWIE cast members on an infinite number of typewriters trying to type the works of Jackie Collins – yet they may have had a point here.
The relationship between Leon and Mathilda was always highly suspect but at the time it was generally summed up as being boldly ambiguous. It isn’t so ambiguous in the longer version. Mathilda romantic infatuation with Leon is made clear and Leon to some extent responds to it. The restored scenes included one where he takes her on a hit with him, a Russian roulette game and her dressing up for him as Madonna and Marilyn. Each one is a what-were-they-thing-of moment, and makes Kick Ass look like no big deal.
That it is Mathilda that is pushing for the relationship to become sexual is especially troubling, as this seems to echo the standard paedophile defence. Of course, in the film it can be explain as the twisted coping mechanism of a traumatised girl thrown into a hideous situation. But it could just be a dirty old man fantasy.
