Wasted Potential From A Professional

Back in grade 11, when my high school started its first film class, my teacher had an assistant with whom I would banter a lot about movies (as well a the teacher himself, but that's another matter). Towards the end of the year, we were running low on time to watch movies and still fit in everything my teacher wanted to do.  Instead of watching movies in full, he and the assistant began screening clips from movies they recommended for us to see, and seeing as I had a huge supply of clips available on my computer at the time I made numerous offers to use them but was turned down every time. 

One of the first clips we were shown was a scene from the movie Léon: The Professional, specifically the scene in which Natalie Portman manages to survive the massacre of her family by total chance (she happened to be out buying groceries at the time and got home afterwards). I found myself interested in seeing the whole thing, but initially turned down an offer from the assistant to borrow his copy for the weekend. Three years later I finally got around to picking up a copy on Blu-ray and decided to give it a watch. For three years I had been meaning to watch that movie, and what I got was... okay at the most. It's one of those movies that starts out promising but builds up to a disappointing climax that ruins the whole thing. I'll get into more detail about that later.

Luc Besson's work really seems to be hit or miss. Some of his movies, like The Big Blue, are genuinely good. Others, like The Fifth Element are over-the-top and campy but still fun to watch. Then he has one or two movies that are just bad, the best example being Lucy; one of the only times I have walked out of a theater. (Why did you make an entire science fiction movie out of an idea that has been completely debunked by science?) Léon: The Professional might not be as bad as Lucy, for sure. However, it is hardly Besson's best work either. It has some good ideas but also a mountain of wasted potential.

The story concerns the relationship between an assassin named Léon, played by Jean Reno; and a young girl named Mathilda, played by a teenage Natalie Portman. Mathilda happens to be miserable, living in a dysfunctional family with an abusive father caught up in criminal activity. When corrupt police officer Stansfield played by Gary Oldman gets involved he ends up murdering Mathilda's entire family, including her brother. Mathilda herself survives by total luck simply due to not being present at the time, and takes refuge in Léon's apartment. After spending some time with Léon, she talks him into training her to be an assassin as well so she can get revenge. 

Sounds like a pretty good premise, right? I thought so, too. Unfortunately that doesn't really go the way it should. You have this great setup involving this girl being trained as an assassin... and it's never used. Mathilda gets all these skills and never gets a chance to actually take advantage of them. The most she ever gets to do is shoot a gun blindly through a window (before he begins training her) and use a sniper rifle to shoot a paintball at some random guy jogging. The whole point is supposed to be her quest for revenge... but nope. We can't let her take it on. Better to have Léon do everything while Mathilda just hides.

I mentioned earlier, the climax was what really ruined the movie and pulled me out of it. In this big scene, Stansfield brings a whole team of cops to take out Léon (all because Mathilda was stupid enough to tell him who she was and what she was doing). He explicitly states that there are over 200 of them, seemingly every cop in the city... and not one woman among them. Statistically that seems extremely improbable, and at first I thought it might have just been my feminist side kicking in again. However, thinking about it at length, there was a lot of wasted potential in doing so, and it does raise a few questions about Besson's views on gender, considering all the characters who actually do something are men.

We have an insanely huge army of over 200 male cops who are all taken out by Léon. Where is Mathilda this whole time? She's sneaking out of the building to make sure Léon's potted plant gets out safely. This would have been a great opportunity for her to show off her skills. Instead she is immediately grabbed within moments of leaving the apartment and has to get rescued by Léon who then starts going Rambo on the cops. The whole movie has been about her quest for revenge, but instead it's Léon who dies taking out Stansfield, which was a big disappointment, and Mathilda just runs away. 

Now that alone is annoying, but there is another angle to look at where Besson's treatment of women displays a waste of potential. Throughout the movie, Léon keeps saying that he has this one rule about who he kills: "No women, no children". Okay, sure, he has standards, but I have a question for you Léon, supposing a woman is posing an obvious threat to you? I mean, what are you going to do if Jane Smith comes kicking down your door and has an assault rifle pointed at your forehead? Supposing a bunch of armed cops break into your apartment and one of them happens to be a woman?

Besson apparently made this movie completely failing to consider the fact that female cops and female assassins do exist, which doesn't make sense considering the entire plot consists of him training a girl to be an assassin. His "no women, no children" rule is obviously intended to give him some depth by displaying a moral code, but it never really affects the plot in general.You could take out every single scene where he mentions that code and the story would still be pretty much exactly the same. This climactic scene could have been a great opportunity to test how far Léon would go in sticking to that rule. 

There could have been some dramatic potential in Léon being faced with a female cop holding a loaded gun, and him trying to cope with the possibility that he may have to break his one rule. That could even have been his downfall, with him being unable to bring himself to shoot a female cop and getting killed as a result. That would then have forced Mathilda to become more self-reliant and step up as an action heroine, allowing her to finally confront Stansfield and kill him. Instead, we just have a ridiculously large number of men and Léon beating them up before getting killed taking out the guy who should have been killed by Mathilda.

It's a shame, really, because Léon: The Professional could have been a great movie. There was a lot of good ideas and some great actors who try to do their best with their performances. In the end, however, there are too many opportunities missed. Luc Besson had this brilliant idea for an action movie and completely failed to take advantage of it. I know he can make a good movie, but all we have here was a very good premise that has sadly gone to waste.

French Cinema I like

In this blog I have said a few things that aren't necessarily pleasant about certain films or filmmakers. I've voiced a few times that I don't like Jean-Luc Godard, and I may have also mentioned before that Jaques Tati's Playtime was a movie I found more excruciatingly long than funny, mainly because I felt its scenes didn't have much of a connection, the jokes were poorly timed, and everything seemed to just keep going on and on and on and on and on much longer than it needed to.

So as you can imagine I may have said a few things about French Cinema that haven't exactly been pleasant, but I'd like to make it clear that I've got nothing against French Cinema personally. I might not be overtly fond of the French New wave era and the work that resulted from it (especially Godard), but I have seen some good French movies, and so I thought that it might be good to write a little bit about some of these films to prove it.

So to start, I think I might bring up another movie I was required to watch for the same class in which I was subjected to Playtime and Tout va bien. This movie was released roughly a decade before the two aforementioned films, in 1956, and was set in a Nazi Prison during World War II. This was a movie called A Man Escaped.

Admittedly, I was a bit nervous going into this film, but I thought it was actually pretty well done. The plot centers around a young man named Fontaine, who was a member of the French resistance before being arrested and taken to a Nazi Prison. However, against all odds, Fontaine manages to systematically and carefully devise an elaborate plan to get out. Complications arise, though in particular a cellmate who he may or may not be able to trust.

I found the general step-by-step structure of the movie to be interesting. The whole story is confined to the knowledge of the protagonist, but that makes it all the more interesting when we see him finding creative ways to improvise the necessary components to find his way out as well as to keep the guards from figuring out what he's doing. Of course, in addition to that, there is also a sense of fear, as Fontaine knows he is taking some huge risks and the slightest mistake could cost him everything, especially given some of the daring things he has to do (which includes dismantling the door to his cell, it makes a bit more sense in context).

It all builds up to a tense climax when Fontaine finally carries out his plan, and the exceptional build up makes the ending all the more satisfying.

So next, I'll bring up a classic that often comes up whenever I find myself talking about French Cinema. This is an exceptional piece of comedy as well as a good example of French cinema at its finest. What we have here is a charming little film called Amélie.

Plot-wise, it's a fairly straightforward premise: a young waitress named Amélie Poulain has an experience that inspires her to try and bring happiness to everyone around her, and naturally comedic shenanigans ensue. The jokes are great and well-timed, and even the ones that go on longer manage to be humorous without wearing out their welcome.

Of course, part of what makes this movie so great is the world that it creates. Amélie herself is a very interesting and complex character. We see that she is intelligent, creative, and resourceful, has noble intentions and really puts her mind to her goals, but she also has her problems. She is very shy and has difficulty confronting strangers, especially the man she likes, which in turn interferes with her own happiness. However, there are a number of other great characters she interacts with over the course of the movie, each of whom have their own little stories that she manages to play into.

Finally, I'll bring up a more obscure movie titled The Big Blue. This film was technically shot in English, but made by a French director (who later went on to make several better-known movies, including among other things The Fifth Element). This is a more complicated film than the previous two in terms of story, but has something very interesting to offer. Admittedly it was one that I wanted to see so bad I had to resort to illegal downloading when I realized it was impossible to get on DVD where I live, but it was worth it.

The plot of this movie is a bit harder to explain. It's centered around two professional divers, one of whom is a little bit... too fond of it, to the point where he sometimes seems to be more like a dolphin than a human. Along the way a journalist from America played by Rosanna Arquette enters the picture and forms a close relationship to both men as they partake in various diving competitions.

The plot is exceptionally complicated and might not be easy to follow, but the interactions between the characters are solid (if at times a bit strange) and of course the underwater photography is just unbelievable.

So there you are: three great examples of French Cinema at its finest. This was originally going to be a review of Jaques Tati's Playtime, and I still stand by my thoughts on that along with Godard, but I decided I've said enough things for now against French Cinema and thought that instead perhaps it would be worthwhile to show some of its more positive aspects.