Leon The Professional
THE Strand Arts Centre, in collaboration with Belfast Film Festival, are currently putting on a season of classic crime and gangster movies that covers just about every aspect of that rich and varied filmic tradition.
Already Stanley Kubrick’s masterful The Killing has screened and with the likes of Heat and a special 35mm anniversary print of Goodfellas still to come there’s something for anyone who’s ever been thrilled by cracking crime epics on the silver screen. It runs through until August, throwing up all manner of dark and moody classics along the way but Leon, on next Thursday, remains pretty hard to beat.
Directed by Luc Besson and starring Jean Reno as the titular character, it’s still an odd and strangely offbeat study of a hitman who forms an unlikely relationship with a 12-year-old girl. A character-driven study of human nature with enough blood and gore to render it a full blown action film at the same time, it’s lost none of its power to enchant in the 21 years since it first appeared.
Reno is a successful hitman who plies his trade for a mid-level gangland boss Tony (Danny Aiello). More than a straightforward assassin, he operates to a strict killer’s code (no women or children), drinks milk, lives on his own and has a houseplant as his only friend. Mathilda (Natalie Portman making a memorable screen debut) lives just down the corridor with her deadbeat drug-dealing dad, her low-life step-mother, her irritating half sister and her sweet little baby brother.
When Mathilda comes home from the supermarket one day she finds her whole family killed and the perpetrators of the crime still hanging around outside her door. Wisely she glides on past and knocks on the apartment door of Leon who’s been watching the bloody events unfold. Against his better judgment he lets her in and so begins a sweet and strange friendship that sees the older man train up the child to become a killer like him so that she can exact revenge on the murderers.
It soon becomes clear the pair may have bitten off more than they can chew when they realise the hood behind the killing is a crazed DEA agent (played by a wildly over the top Gary Oldman) who’s capable of doing anything to save his own hide.
Retitled The Professional and shorn of more than 20 minutes of its more controversial scenes for American audiences, it remains a great example of the traditional Hollywood gangster film as viewed through European art house eyes. Reno is superb. His lovable loner is both ruthless and vulnerable. Portman, who lights up the screen as the revenge-thirsty pre-teen, went on to adult fame in everything from Star Wars to Black Swan but never has she equalled the performance she gives here. Oldman is outrageous, and vastly overplaying it as usual – but that only adds to the fun.
Besson would make other fine films of course but Leon marked his arrival as a director of real note. See it on the big screen while you have the chance.
:: Full details of Criminally Good Classics at strandartscentre.com/movies.
