Stream On: Léon, ‘The Professional,’ another—ahem—‘cleaner’
“A perfect assassin. An innocent girl. They have nothing left to lose except each other.”
Last week we looked at an unlikely protagonist, Raven the hitman, a hard sell for 1942 audiences—but novelist Graham Greene, director Frank Tuttle and star Alan Ladd sealed the deal. Nowadays there’s no end of morally challenged main characters in film and TV. In 1994 French director Luc Besson contributed, among others, Léon the hitman (or “cleaner,” as Léon would have it), and threw in a twelve-year-old protégé for him, to stir things up a little more.
/Amazon /Streaming /🍅74%🍿95% /Trailer /1994 /R
Luc Besson (The Fifth Element), an idiosyncratic director, to put it mildly, released La Femme Nikita in 1990, about a drug addict forced to become an assassin by her government, to mixed reviews. One of the characters was Victor, a “cleaner,” played by Jean Reno (Ronin), and Besson liked Reno’s interpretation so much he wrote a story for him. When filming of The Fifth Element was delayed due to Bruce Willis’s schedule, Besson took the time to shoot The Professional as a passion project.
Victor became Léon, and the hook of the movie was provided by another young female character, Mathilda Lando (Natalie Portman, Heat, in her film debut), Léon’s twelve-year-old neighbor, who becomes orphaned when corrupt DEA agents kill her family.
Besson, reviled by French critics as the man who ruined French cinema (you’ve got to love it!), developed a slick, almost ultra-Hollywood, style that audiences adore, even when, as in The Fifth Element, they have no idea what’s going on. But the storytelling in The Professional is clear and concise.
—Léon (Jean Reno) is a hitman working for a mafioso named “Old Tony” (Danny Aiello) in the Little Italy neighborhood of New York City. One day, Léon meets Mathilda (Natalie Portman), a lonely twelve-year-old who lives with her dysfunctional family in an apartment down the hall from Léon, and has stopped attending class at her school for troubled girls.
Mathilda's abusive father attracts the ire of corrupt DEA agents, who have been paying him to stash cocaine in his apartment. After they discover that he’s been stealing from their stash, DEA agents invade the apartment, led by their boss, sharply dressed drug-addict Norman Stansfield (a way-over-the-top Gary Oldman, The Book of Eli). During their search for the missing drugs, Stansfield murders Mathilda's family while she is out shopping for groceries. When she returns, Mathilda realizes what has happened just in time to continue down the hall to Léon's apartment as if she lived there; he hesitantly gives her shelter.
Mathilda quickly discovers that Léon is a hitman. She begs him to take care of her and to teach her his skills, as she wants to avenge the murder of her four-year-old brother.
The Professional features action set-pieces that rival The Matrix in their stylized choreography: Léon engages in firefights against a drug lord’s security team and later, a whole precinct of New York City police, while protecting his potted plant (his “only friend,” as he explains to Mathilda).
Mathilda humorously attempts to loosen up the rigorously ascetic Léon, and develops a crush on him that’s tamped down in the U.S. theatrical release; the director’s cut version approaches (but only approaches) true creepiness. (Besson himself met child actress Maïwenn Le Besco when she was twelve, waiting just three years to begin a romantic relationship with her. By the time she was sixteen, they were married, and Maïwenn had given birth to the couple’s daughter, Shanna. Maïwenn has a small part in The Professional as “The Blonde Babe.”)
The Professional is still very popular with audiences, hence the current 95% score on Rotten Tomatoes. It has heart, humor, insane action, and great performances by some of 1994’s (and today’s) top talent.
Sources include Mental Floss; Far Out Magazine; and Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)
Pete Hummers is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to earn fees by linking Amazon.com and affiliate sites. This adds nothing to Amazon's prices. This column originally appeared on The Outer Banks Voice.