Re-watched the movie with my wife last night (she liked the movie a lot): they do it subtly, so much so I missed it first time around.
The way the scenes worked, each of them rubbed each other the wrong way, in sequence:
Mathilda declares her love for Leon while lying on the bed. Leon, disconcerted by this, asks her how she knows. She replies (“I feel it in my stomach”). Leon, disconcerted even more by this answer, brushes it off (“I’m glad you don’t have a stomach-ache, but I don’t think it means anything”). You can see he’s visibly upset - by his reaction out in the hall when he leaves ‘for work’.
Mathilda apparently interprets this as Leon rejecting her. She broods on it. Then, she goes and trolls the hotel clerk (“he’s not my father, he’s my lover”).
Leon, knowing he’s angered Mathilda, attempts to make it up to her by buying her a dress. She ignores him while he tries to display this present to her. Then, the clerk arrives and boots him out as a pedophile.
At their new hotel, Leon showers & performs surgery on himself - Mathilda waits. When he emerges, she is attentive to him & serves him a glass of milk - she knows he’s (rightly) angry with her. Then, she offers him money to kill her enemies - he rejects it, and as they argue, her (“I’m tired of your games”). She them plays russian roulette, daring him to let her kill herself - finally forcing him to concede that, in fact, he lovers her ‘at least a little’.
Yeah, I always liked this movie - this thread made me seek out the extended version. I think you sum it up well. It is a disconcerting story even without the extra scenes, but it seems to me the characters are real enough, if outside the norm (not all adult males are contract killers, not all young girls are… precocious). The scripting deals well with the interaction of two outlying statistics.
Thanks! Do check out the extended version. It would be interesting to hear what you think of the differences.
To my mind, at least some of the scenes that were cut were classic scenes that truly add depth to the movie - in particular, the “I win love or death” Russian-roulette scene.
Just because I am in a film-buff-analysis-wankery mood …
One thing I really enjoyed in re-watching the movie was the use of symbolism in the scenes.
Four things stood out to me:
In the scene where we first see Mathilda - her placement and the dialogue were designed, I thought, to reinforce the notion that she is in a sort of prision. Her legs dangle through the bars of the railing like the bars of a cell. She is smoking a cigarette. When asked by Leon why she is hiding her cigarette, she says “because this building has so many rats” (a tem one associates with prision informers more than neighbours). Then he spots her bruised face. Right away, we know a lot about her situation - her family home is not a refuge but a prision.
The “ring”. It is the ring on the pin of a hand grenade, but it is also, symbolically, a sort of wedding ring from Leon to Mathilda - it combines the themes of love and death: with this ring, Leon offers himself to Mathilda in the only way he could - killing himself and Mathilda’s enemy in one blast, rather than in marriage.
As Leon states at one point, “I’m tired of your games, Mathilda”. The notion of games runs through the whole movie - they can be innocent, childlike amusements, or fully adult and nasty - in a sense, murder is played as a sort of game: a kind of final hide-and-seek (at which Leon is of course a master). To my mind, one of the keys to the movie is that it becomes very difficult to tell which “games” played by Mathilda are innocent and which are not - increasingly, it appears that none of the games she plays are really innocent.
For example, take the charades she plays with Leon. On the surface of course this is fully innocent, a childhood game - but she chooses as the first two charades highly sexualized examples (Madonna and Monroe). It isn’t clear that Leon notices this, but the audience does, making them (I assume) uneasy.
Later, of course, her games grow nastier and more manipulative - culminating in her ‘fun game’ of Russian Roulette, which she introduces in a similar way to the charades (“it’s a game that makes you nicer” rather than “it’s a game that helps your memory”).
Adoptive parental relationships are of course a big thing in this movie. The most obvious example is Leon/Mathilda - the big question in the movie is of course whether his love for her is paternal, romantic, or neither/both. However, another example is that of Leon to the Italian mob boss who employs him, who clearly became, in a sense, Leon’s adoptive father (if a rather exploitive one). The best scene illustrating that is the one where the mob boss (whose name escapes me) warns Leon off women as they cause “nothing but trouble”; later, Leon introduces Mathilda to him, and it is a scene almost exactly like a boy introducing an “inappropriate” girlfriend to his father (something I remember very well from being a teen! ) - even though, of course, all that is mentioned is the “work”.
Isn’t it amazing that Luc Besson could make a movie this deep that we keep talking about it 20+ years later. And then Besson goes and squeezes out a turd like Lucy. I don’t get it.
Besson has had a number of turds between this and Lucy. And I’ve read, but can’t quickly find, that Leon might have also been a turd if Besson hadn’t been controlled.
I think that Besson fell prey to the same thing that hit Wolfgang Petersen and George Lucas, success caused them to surround themselves with yes-men and rather than trying to make ‘good’ movies, they turned to making ‘money maker’ movies.
By this time, I imagine that Besson makes movies more to keep financing his 20 year old mistress that he keeps in a house in the South of France than because he wants to make a good film. Which, I suppose, is his choice to make but it means that he hasn’t made any films worth a damn since 1994.
I’d might have a hard time arguing with that. Though it does kinda raise the question of how to define “good film.” The Fifth Element is very entertaining in a ridiculously over-the-top Big Trouble in Little China way. Are they good flicks or just fun ones?
I haven’t watched The Fifth Element since it came out, whereas I’ve had many dozens of chances to rewatch Big Trouble in Little China, and so I know how it can grow on you over time. So, perhaps you are right and it is able to maintain ones interest over time. But with my single watch under my belt, my impression was that it’s not even as good as Avatar (which I didn’t care for). Avatar is at least based on the plot to Fern Gully, a movie for young tweens. The Fifth Element is the plot to the Care Bears, a TV show for toddlers.
Heh, had a movie night for my kid and his cousins, watched Matilda - based on the famous Roald Dahl story.
The thought occurred to me: could the name of the character “Mathilda” in Leon - The Professional be a reference to this book?
We know that Besson isn’t above this sort of joke - think of how Mathilda registers Leon into a hotel under the name “Mcguffin”.
There are some amusing similarities.
In both cases, the character is a precocious girl who dislikes her low-life family that abuses and does not appreciate her
In both cases, the father is a criminal who gets in trouble because of his criminality, leaving the girl in the care of a foster-parent figure
The antagonist in both cases is a sadistic psychopath in a position of official authority, who gets away with (his and her) crimes because they are so outrageous - they are seemingly able to do whatever they want to anyone with total impunity
In both cases, the foster-parent figure is sort of child-like - their lives are transformed by the kid, who in some ways, is more ‘adult’.
In both cases, the foster-parent figure has a fortune that is being held for them by someone else
The differences are of course legion … starting with the spelling of the character’s name. Still …
I am reminded of this rather interesting thread we did on Leon a while back.
Among other points made, a conclusion was reached that Besson is a clueless hack who just happened to blunder into a masterpiece (talking about Leon here) by complete accident. Which I tend to agree with.
I agree the movie could not have worked without some great actors.
OTOH, there was too much great stuff in the shooting and editing of the movie for it to be all on the actors - some of the shots are movie classics. Luc gets kudos for that, even though, as far as I know, he’s done nothing to compare since.
I saw Lucy the other day, and it was almost bad enough to go back in time and retroactively make all his other movies stinkers …
…
Another interesting aspect to that previous thread is that the original, shorter version of the movie - that cut a lot of the ‘upsetting’ scenes out - evidently resulted in many people finding the relationship between the characters more questionable than the longer version (hence the question in the OP).
In the shorter version, there is the same sexual tension from Mathilda, and in one scene they wake up in bed together. In the long version, there is a scene that explains that Mathilda had propositioned Leon, who turns her down … but she then convinces him to share the bed with her platonicly. It is also clear that what she knows about sex, she gleaned from schoolyard rumour and reading her horrible sister’s trashy magazines.
If all you saw was the shorter version, it is possible to get the impression that they did in fact have sex, which changes the movie’s dynamic a lot.
What auteur ? The author’s dead, man. They might *think *they aren’t, and even make noises with their mouths and pens to convince us otherwise. But they ain’t fooling anybody.
I’ll chime in with the Fifth Element fans, since that time I’ve tended to be unaware of his new releases. It wasn’t until this Thread that I realized he directed Lucy (which I haven’t seen). I don’t remember hating the Joan of Arc movie, but at best it was forgettable. I saw the first Arthur and The Invisibles movie- forgettable for me but it seems he’s succeeded in getting two sequels made (which I wasn’t aware of). I saw The Family recently on Netflix and it was just a mess- a lot that could have been good but it just didn’t work.
Looking at his filmography on Wiki, seems the only post-Fifth Element film he’s directed that has a decent Rotten Tomatoes score is The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec from 2010 (83% on Rotten Tomatoes).
Though I admit, I haven’t actually seen Lucy.
