Can a professional assassin have a personal life? Can they ever leave the killing behind, or does the only exit lead directly to an anonymous grave? It’s a theme that French action auteur Luc Besson has returned to again and again, but never so effectively as in 1990’s La Femme Nikita and 1994’s Leon: The Professional.
In the former, Anne Parillaud is the titular Nikita, a nihilistic junkie sentenced to death after she kills a cop during a robbery gone wrong. Her execution faked, she is recruited by Tchéky Karyo’s enigmatic spook as a deniable asset of the French government. After years of rigorous training, she’s set up in Paris under a fake identity, where she’s occasionally called upon to eliminate enemies of the state.
Meanwhile, Jean Reno is professional killer Leon, who takes his assignments from Danny Aiello’s Tony, a power broker in New York City’s Little Italy. Leon is a perfect assassin and has almost no life to speak of apart from his job. When he’s not whacking rival criminals for Tony, he’s watching classic movies at a revival theatre or caring for his single houseplant. It’s a lonely existence, but a stable one.
Both our cool killers come to question their vocations when they form an attachment with another person. For Nikita, it’s romantic love with nice guy Marco (Jean-Hugues Anglade), from whom she must conceal her double life. As for Leon, he becomes a father figure to 12-year-old Mathilda (a brilliant Natalie Portman in her first film role) after her family are killed by corrupt DEA Agent Stansfield (a scenery-chewing Gary Oldman). She becomes his apprentice, learning the ins and outs of the murder business, but Leon knows that Mathilda deserves a better life.
Jean Reno as ‘Leon: The Professional’. Source: Buena Vista International (Australia)
And that’s the rub – Besson walks a thin line, at once impressing us with just how damn cool Leon and Nikita are when they’re in action, but also that the life of a killer is an emotionally devasting one. In La Femme Nikita, the horror of state-sanctioned murder is made plain when Nikita is forced to team up with the sociopathic Victor the Cleaner (Jean Reno), who doesn’t flinch at pouring acid over the body of a still-living victim. In Leon: The Professional, we get the carrot rather than the stick – the promise of a more normal existence with Mathilda makes Leon reconsider his life choices.
But we still get plenty of amazing action sequences – Besson, one of the key practitioners of the French school – couldn’t make an ugly movie if he tried, and so the fight sequences here are exquisite: consider Nikita’s “trial by fire” restaurant shoot-out or Leon, hanging upside down from the ceiling, holding off a SWAT team with a pistol in each hand. The characters themselves are visually striking: Parillaud, with her punkish black shag haircut, playing the femme fatale in a variety of slinky outfits, their eroticism in contrast to the cold deadliness of her armoury, while Reno in his round glasses and beanie, his long coat and weapons-filled leather vest, is instantly iconic.
Natalie Portman in her first film role. Source: Buena Vista International (Australia)
But it’s not all surface, although it’s the surface-level sheen that hooks us; in Besson’s urban world of paid killers and their protégés, lethal assassins and their lovers, it’s the secret heart of the hitman that matters, and this double feature is the perfect way to explore that hidden country.
