Letterboxd Season Challenge 2019-2020! Theme one, part three - a favorite film from one of the past hosts!
(Chosen by John!)
All three films chosen for this first theme offer the possibility of discussions around their alternate cuts, between A Nightmare on Elm Street's different endings and the infamous disaster of New World Pictures recutting Nausicaä into Warriors of the Wind. I made brief mention of the one and no mention of the other, as they aren't quite relevant enough to the common watching experience to hold the center of an extended discussion around the same. With Léon: The Professional, though, we've a film whose different versions are substantially different from one another to such a degree as to prompt radically different responses from the viewer. On its initial US release in 1994, the film lost twenty-two minutes of footage directly depicting more uncomfortable aspects of Léon and Mathilda's relationship, namely an extended montage of Mathilda helping Léon with his contract killing and almost dying in the process, and two major scenes of her attempting to initiate explicitly romantic and later sexual contact between the two. It's easy to see why scenes that outright confirm child endangerment and near-miss child-adult intimacy were traded for a more ambiguous tone, but having seen the director's cut (or international version or long version or however you prefer it called) last night, I believe the cuts here do the story's depth more harm than good.
Luc Besson's stylish visuals already emphasize an uncomfortable sense of closeness, introducing us to major characters with a series of shots depicting little pieces of their bodies filling the frame, lingering on the mundane and routine of their downtime, framing shot-reverse-shot conversations as close to the actors as possible. With so emotionally stunted a pair as an illiterate hitman who knows his job, his plant, and precious little else, and a prepubescent girl from an abusive home who lost everything in the blink of an eye, such tight, millimeter-distant images are practically necessary to draw them from their shells. Their circumstances keep them largely separated from the outside world, rarely imbuing anything outside the immediate sphere of Léon's rented apartments, and are often blunt with one another to the point of denying a serious emotional dynamic otherwise. This isn't to say they lack care of affection for one another - a big part of the film's success comes down to how Léon and Mathilda are honest to one another without fail, direct about their every thought and intention to a fault - but rather, they care too much about some particularly taboo subjects to show much. Léon knows full well what he's doing when he trains Mathilda to serve as an assassin yet does so anyways when he repeatedly fails to get ahead of her quick wit and smart mouth, and Mathilda's traumatized, easily-impressionable young mind drives her to push for a sexually active relationship with Léon despite the situation deteriorating every time she does so. If Besson didn't force us into such close-quarters with this pair during every interaction, their tendency to repeatedly stonewall one another emotionally might leave the film without a driving conflict.
Not Gary Oldman's evergreen, maniacal performance as corrupt DEA agent Norman Stansfield, understand. He'd practically vanish from the film too without its real conflict - the razor's edge of whether or not Mathilda will succeed in her advances, and more importantly the why behind her success or failure. Taking the film as initially released in US markets one understands the lion's share of the conflict. Léon's decades of isolation as a killer and general social vacuum leave him unable to handle Mathilda's shocking statements of being in love and wanting to have sex, so he shuts her down and out by emotionally distancing himself, which frustrates Mathilda and drives her to do something impulsive like sneak back into her active crime scene of an apartment or nearly commit suicide to prove her dedication to Léon, who subsequently has to bend and guide Mathilda down the path to a revenge he thinks she's better off without. However much the pair benefit one another (be it Mathilda teaching Léon to read or Léon keeping Mathilda alive), however much the pair are able to clearly speak their minds for good or ill (there's a LOT wrong with how they interact if we're looking for a healthy, stable relationship, but Mathilda is always up-front about wanting to have sex, and Léon is always simple and blunt about saying no), their inability to understand one another emotionally causes the situation to grow progressively unstable. Their lives are threatened by Stansfield not because he's a deranged, drug-abusing, power-tripping lunatic who can and will call down every cop in NYPD to get his way, but because Léon and Mathilda cannot live with one another without this push-pushback-slide dynamic gradually shoving them towards Stansfield's path.
In the theatrical cut, there's effectively no resolution. Those scenes in the international cut, however, provide both more extreme, boundary-pushing content, and a solid set of beats to bring Léon and Mathilda into a state of emotional stability between each other. When Léon takes Mathilda on jobs with him, he's crossing a line he simply does not in the theatrical version, placing an actual child in mortal danger and subsequently encouraging her to push things far further with the champagne and attempted-kiss in public scene. It is integral that he realize what he's done after she's nearly blown to shreds by a paranoid client, and good that he opts to leave her behind on his next job in the following scene, but because he leaves her behind with the same forceful, no discussion approach as always, he only pushes things to the breaking point when Mathilda spends hours brooding and ultimately decides to kill Stansfield on her lonesome. The subsequent sequence where Léon is forced to save her life becomes the result of his choices throughout the whole film, and demand the change in affect during the other major cut scene in his apartment. Mathilda comes on stronger than ever, attempting to seduce Léon into bed as thanks for her rescue, and he finally responds with equal emotional honesty as his earlier practical honesty, telling her about how his first and only love was killed by her father to defend his family's honor, prompting Léon to kill the man for revenge and flee to America to become a cleaner. It seems this, ultimately, gets through to Mathilda, and when she brings Léon to bed rather than watch him sleep in his chair another night, it is only so she can have someone close and reassuring by her side while she sleeps.
You get into a very messy situation when considering the nature of Léon and Mathilda's relationship, for despite the young girl wielding most of the power and influence over an older man who can't quite keep pace with her, we as an audience know for certain the ability to control things still lies with Léon by virtue of his age and greater experience. A girl so young cannot be responsibly considered the the driving force in any age-gapped relationship, much less one whose impulses drive her to bloodlust and straight lust beyond her years. If we only take the theatrical cut, without these scenes, Léon remains an entirely passive figure until the action climax, the film only ceding him any real responsibility in the relationship when he does a bunch of badass things to help Mathilda escape Stansfield alive. With the full film in mind, with Léon recognizing how wrong his passivity in turning Mathilda into a killer like him and allowing her to lash out emotionally are, with Léon treating Mathilda like someone who deserves to know everything rather than someone only deserving a distancing hand, we have instead a film that reaches an emotional climax point that strengthens the action climax. These two are definitively not lovers, their unease towards one another is far better sublimated by opening up rather than giving in, and there is no chance in hell Léon would ever touch Mathilda, or even Mathilda touch Léon once she properly understands his heart, I should think. Had they come to this revelatory breakthrough earlier, they might have even avoided their tragic ending.
But they do not, and likely could not, not with how deeply marked they are by their respective traumas, not with how the coincidences that saved Mathilda's life placed her in the care of a man she found inappropriately irresistible with nobody from the outside to help or intervene. This ending seems sadly inevitable, and though they both grow and mature for the better in one another's company, it's only Mathilda who gets to live beyond these encounters. With any luck, she can flourish alongside Léon's plant, and become something more than what fate near-deigned her.
Comparatively speaking, the only real "benefit" the theatrical cut has from these removals is making the moment when Léon wakes up in bed next to Mathilda seem all the more pedophilic, since it lacks the emotionally-heavy lead-in that actively denies any possibility of sexual contact between the two. If the intent was to remove any uncomfortable implications, showing us a man waking up in bed next to a little girl with no explanation as to how they got there fails completely. Why that scene was spared the chopping block when the scene of Mathilda brooding after Léon leaves her at home because it lost the context of her almost dying, when it can readily map to practically any emotion the audience wants her to feel is beyond me.
Besson's full vision for Léon: The Professional spends large portions of its runtime dancing through fire, and certainly comes close to walking away with more than just singed toes from time to time - I'm still not sure if Léon actually has a moral concept that sleeping with a child is wrong and has the personal motivating factor of a lost love on top of that, or if it's only the tragedy born from his own prior romance and reaction keeping him from sleeping with Mathilda. To my best estimation, it succeeds in its goal of deftly treading dangerous grounds to deliver a satisfying, resonant story with flying colors. The central relationship turns out weirdly wholesome for all its near brushes with pedophilia, Jean Reno and Natalie Portman communicate a whole hell of a lot've internal conflict for playing characters who are walled off from the world, and the dual contrast between them and Oldman's exploding maniac/the internalized domestic scenes against the slick, efficient action scenes helps the film pound at heart and mind in the same motion. It's a dangerous collision of technical ballet and utterly mad scramble for safety on a plane that could erupt with a single misplaced step, and walking away having entertained and moved without more than some soot on its face is downright incredible.
(Quick thing to put to lie: I saw some rumors flying around claiming Besson's original script included an actual sex scene between Léon and Mathilda. Closest I can find to a source on that is this page, which reeks of fakery, and has only been covered by clickbaiting sites like Cracked and WhatCulture. Considering Besson's already a bit of a sex creep in real life, and considering there are numerous corroborated stories of Natalie Portman's parents objecting to scenes of her character smoking and being glimpsed naked in the shower yet none of them reacting to a sex scene, either the scene was cut long before casting calls went out, or someone's lying through their teeth, and I'd be gobsmacked if a supposed screenplay that's apparently virtually identical for the first fifty minutes but completely changes to something with a far inferior writing style after that point and somehow made its way into some nerd's hands if even the actors never saw it has any degree of voracity.)
4.5/5
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