Leon was directed by Luc Besson, luminary of the modern French cinema du look which carried a surplus of cinematic style without too many layers of content - pulp cinema, in essence. The hitman archetype was so well established by now that it permitted such romantic subversions as Jean Renos pro killer and childlike innocent, whose homicidal skills help protect a young girl orphaned by Gary Oldman's corrupt, manic drug-enforcement agent. It's a theme that had played well before: original US indie filmmaker John Cassavetes had cast his wife, Gena Rowlands, in the title role of Gloria, as a brassy blonde Mafia moll who gets handy with a handgun when she realises her friends intend to kill a little boy who witnessed his family's murders. It played well as a crime drama with a streak of sentimentality, but Leon has a more fairytale element. A paternal saviour to 12-year-old Natalie Portman's Mathilda, the title character is the movie hitman archetype Sam Jackson was referring to when he spoke of an individual focused purely on his homicidal day-job and otherwise estranged from society. It's disturbing as he teaches the young girl the tricks of his trade, and perhaps slightly unsettling as she starts to profess her love for a grown man. But Reno's Leon is a milk-drinking holy savant, who gets to redeem himself with the skills of his own murderousness. As he goes willingly to his grave, leaving Mathilda's life and her future secured, the child he has saved is forced to step away from her dream of becoming a hitwoman and go back to school. It's a contradictorily heartwarming morality tale, only lightly disguised as hardboiled crime fiction.
Writer/editor/ghost-writer transfixed by crime, cinema and the serrated edges of popular culture. Those similarly afflicted are invited to make contact.
