This is Besson's first English-language film. I saw this when it first came out, and felt a little uneasy (as this time round) about the relationship between a middle-aged man and a twelve-year-old girl. They seem initially to be opposites: he is a hardened hit-man working for the mafia, whereas she is an innocent whose whole family has been wiped out by bent cops. But it's more complicated than that: Léon (Jean Reno) is in fact very knowledgeable about weapons, but is illiterate and his boss Tony (Danny Aiello) 'looks after' the naive Léon's money; Matilda (Nathalie Portman) doesn't seem much concerned about the death of her parents, but she wants to avenge the death of her four-year-old brother. (Her parents were killed by DEA agents: they'd been paying the parents to hide cocaine found on dealers, but the parents had been keeping some cocaine for themselves and adulterating the rest.)
Very briefly Léon considers killing Mathilda in her sleep, but soon warms to her: she's much more worldly-wise than her years and they come to an arrangement: she lives with Léon, does the shopping, tidies the flat and teaches him to read whereas Léon teaches her how to use a gun and a rifle.
It becomes uncomfortable for Léon when Mathilda falls in love with him because the love he feels for her is purely of an odd kind of paternal nature, and he tells Tony that his own money all goes to a girl called Mathilda if he dies.
Die he does, although he has a weird symbolic re-birth when Mathilda plants his beloved pot plant in the gardens of her new school. This film was more popular with general audiences, partly because American critics thought Besson had known little of what Americans, and particularly New Yorkers, are really like: they thought his ideas just came from American films.
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