Hen Pauker
Dr. Manuel A. Pérez Tejada
English 1102 D2
02/05/09

What a Beautiful Combination

A phenomenon that has caught on in Hollywood lately is that a lot of foreign directors move to Hollywood to produce American films. Those kinds of directors usually bring to Hollywood a combination of characteristics from America and their native country. I chose one of those foreign directors, Luc Besson and his movie Leon. In one of the biggest cities in America--New York City--he created Leon as a Hollywood movie. In my essay I will write about the life of Luc Besson briefly, discuss Leon’s plot and then explain how through the movie we can see characteristics of Hollywood action films and at the same time characteristics from the French Cinema. I will also show how Besson’s native roots contribute to the brighter and happier part of the movie.

Luc Besson was born in Paris on March 18, 1959 and because of his mom’s and dad’s jobs (they were diving instructors), he grew up traveling around the world (including Italy, Yugoslavia, and Greece). The love for cinema in Besson’s heart was found when he studied for his first degree in Paris. Besson created his own film company- “films du loup”, finished his degree and went to work in Hollywood as a studio hand. Then he decided that he wanted to create his own movies. He started to work as assistant director and after a few films, he made his first movie when he was just 20 years old (1980); the name of the movie was L’avant-dernier and thanks to this movie, Besson won a lot of prizes and this success encouraged him to make more and more movies.

The movie Leon was made in 1994 and it had great success around the world. The movie is about Leon, a hit man that has a good heart and about Leon’s neighbor, Mathilda, a 12 year old girl that spent her life with an unstable family. Her father got involved with one of the stronger and more dangerous men in town, Norman Stansfield – a drugged, corrupt agent who is also the head of the drug enforcement administration. One day Norman came to Mathilda’s house with his gangsters and just killed all of her family while Mathilda was out to buy milk. The only place that she could think of going to hide from Norman and his guys was Leon’s apartment. Mathilda asked Leon to teach her how to use a gun for just one goal - to avenge her little brother’s death. In return she will do all of the housekeeping work and teach Leon how to read and write. From that point, Besson shows us the relationship and the adventures that Mathilda and Leon go through together.

The entire plot takes place in New York City in a place that called “Little Italy”, a small neighborhood in Manhattan. The name “Little Italy” came from the fact that most of the neighborhood’s population came from Italia. The combination of New York City, one of the biggest and significant cities in America and a place like “Little Italy” indicates that Besson has some affection to Europe- his home land. At the beginning of the movie we can see the narrow streets, with a crane shot that gives us the feeling of the crowding neighborhood like those exist in Europe. It is hard to say that Leon has a direct contact to France – the place Besson was born. The fact that Besson grew up in so many different places in Europe, gives us, the audience, feeling that there is more connection to Europe in general and not particularly to France (for example, we can see in the movie a strong relationship to Italy, one of the places where Besson grew up).

The second place that Besson takes us through his movie is to Leon’s Boss’s restaurant. The restaurant’s location is in “Little Italy” and over there Tonny (Leon’s boss) gives Leon the extermination list (list/pictures of the people Tonny wants to be killed by Leon. Tonny is also Leon’s Bank (according to his words he is better than the banks); he saved Leon’s money instead of giving it to him directly. His restaurant is furnished with chairs and tables and there are red-white maps on top of the tables. Italian food is served to the people and the entire atmosphere in the restaurant scenes had a European style. Right after this scene Besson presents to us one of the fanciest hotels in New York City where Leon needs to do his next mission. Here we can see the contradiction between the atmospheres in the restaurant and the one in the hotel. This opposition implies the difference between the places Leon hangs out usually to where he going to do his job. Until now, we saw the characteristics of a foreign film in the restaurant and over the streets of “Little Italy”, but here in the hotel all the Hollywood characteristics are starting to be revealed- the guns, the intense music and Leon’s clever acts.

For the role of Leon, Besson chose a French actor-Jean Reno (another example of showing his affection to the homeland). In contradiction to the noise that exists in New York City’s streets, hotels and public places, Leon’s apartment is simple and quiet. Actually, the world outside Leon’s apartment and the world inside his apartment are totally two different places. Before I will give examples for this opposition I want to explain first why I this contradiction exist. The world outside his apartment helps the movie to be what it is-a Hollywood movie. On the other hand, the atmosphere in Leon’s apartment is more convenient, calm and peaceful that takes us – the audience--to another movie, a kind of world cinema movie.

On the streets, Leon is following after people with a threatening figure and a suspicious look. He is walking with deliberate steps and does not speak too much, but above all of that, the most frightening fact is that he is really a murderer. At the beginning of the movie, in the hotel scene, we can barely see him; he is hiding, jumping and surprising his targets in a way that surprises us too; we can only see the consequences of his acts and the terrifying faces of his victims. In the last scene when Leon and Mathilda are trying to get away from the cups, the lighting is gray which gives us the gloomy and sad feeling that we had each time when Leon wasn’t inside the apartment with Mathilda.

In his apartment, we can see a brighter light, a kind of yellow that gives us a happier and more comfortable feeling. He has a small wood table with three matching chairs and his tiny and not fancy TV. The white curtains are very long and thin, which gives you a feeling of freedom. The most important item in the apartment is Leon’s plant. He takes care of it like it was his son and even after he is leaving his small and nice apartment he is not leaving his plant behind. He feeds him and even says that it is his best friend. The plant shows us the other side of Leon-sweet, gentle, innocent and simply a person that know how to enjoy small things. The things that he is doing in the house- ironing his shirt, taking care of his plant, and drinking his milk with a peaceful look gives us the audience peaceful moments with classical music in the background. The games that he is playing with Mathilda and the writing-reading lessons that she is giving him makes the new apartment even warmer.

In the last scene everything is mixing together--the cups, his destroyed apartment and Mathilda’s. It seems like the two worlds of crime and peace are combined together and trying to destroy each other. Usually, Leon was always sent by Tonny to kill people, but now people have been sent to kill him in his own place. The fact that this is the first time in the movie that we saw fights in Leon’s place give us an unsecure feeling, but also a suspicious feeling that something bad is going to happen.

Through the movie, Jean Reno as a French actor takes those two different worlds of crime and peace and presents them to us as the difference between the Hollywood cinema and his “French world”. His accent while he speaks with Mathilda gives us the atmosphere of a dramatic French movie, while his speechless acts with guns reminds us of the action in a Hollywood film. The combination between those two worlds made this movie a special and fascinating one.