“Can we try with real bul­lets now?“

It had been a while since I’d seen Leon. I vaguely recalled see­ing it back in the nineties (though not when it was released in ’94) and remem­bered how much I’d liked it. I think about eight years ago — before DVDs were big — I bought it on VHS but after mov­ing to the US a few years back, I hadn’t seen it since.

I’m not sure what com­pelled me to want to watch it, but it prob­a­bly had some­thing to do with see­ing East­ern Promises, which boasts a sim­i­lar inde­pen­dent feel whilst remain­ing solid to the core. So, con­sid­er­ing this film is four­teen years old and I am a totally dif­fer­ent (par­tially grown-up) indi­vid­ual, I wasn’t sure how much I’d actu­ally enjoy Leon again.

I shouldn’t have been con­cerned, this film is sim­ply great. I watched it like a breeze. Clock­ing in at over two-hours, it flowed and kept me inter­ested, whilst not drag­ging, until the last mem­o­rable scene. I recalled see­ing things I’d for­got­ten, waited for oth­ers I knew were com­ing and basi­cally just sat back and watched. It’s been a while since I watched a Luc Besson film, let alone one star­ring the great Jean Reno, Gary Old­man and a sin­cerely less mature Natalie Port­man (phys­i­cal at least) so to see this mem­ory engram again reminded me how much I liked French cin­ema, how much I loved Gary Old­man and how much I should really see a few more of Jean Reno’s Euro­pean films instead of the usual Hol­ly­wood fare.

There is no real way to describe this film for me when pass­ing it on to another. The fact that Leon is a Hit­man will already get some eyes rolling, but the fact that he pseudo-adopts a neighbour’s orphaned child and the two grow together in ways most American-studio films would turn away from should make those same eyes steady.

The core of this film, the one thing that is inher­ent to the piece and inter­ests the most is the rela­tion­ship between Mathilda (Port­man) and Leon (Reno) — you can­not ignore Stans­field (Old­man), but he is not part of the dynamic at this film’s cen­tre. Both Mathilda and Leon are two sides of the same coin, and a coin that’s been turned inside out and upside down.

Where Leon is the adult, he is also the inno­cent one (iron­i­cally given his pro­fes­sion). He lives alone, befriends a plant and drinks his milk like a good boy. Mathilda is the smoker, the swearer, the more out­wardly ambigu­ous of the pair and yet she is all of twelve. When these pair come together they shake each other’s worlds.

I don’t want to go into too many details on this one, but it’s suf­fi­cient to say this is a char­ac­ter film built on rela­tion­ships as only Luc Besson would visu­al­ize them: quiet, loud, sane, crazy, young, old, good, bad… all are inter­twined and under­scored with char­ac­ter devel­op­ments and only the best are used to por­tray them.

See this film, it’s… cool.