I tried writing one review of this already and it ended up being all over the place. The problem I have with this movie is, it’s among a small cluster of movies that I watched almost repeatedly when I was first falling in love with the movies. Apart from the extra footage that’s in this longer version, which still catches me off guard, I practically know the movie by heart. It’s impossible for me to make a fresh judgment of the movie – it’s either an embarassing reminder of my youth, or simply, awesome.

I completely advise watching the longer version because, though the extra scenes are not essential to the story (it was a favourite movie long before I had access to the long version), once you’ve seen those scenes, you just can’t forget them. They deepen the relationship between Léon and Mathilda and I’d honestly say it’s a better handling of this kind of relationship than either of the Lolita movie adaptations or any of its clones.

This is a highly stylised movie – even New York looks strange, it’s only Central Park that truly gives away the location. The costumes are particularly stylised and probably it’s the costumes that make a lot of people even more uncomfortable with Natalie Portman’s character/performance. The fact is, she is sexy as hell in this movie, and she’s meant to be. Our connection to Léon practically depends on this point – we feel his discomfort when she dances dressed as Madonna and Marilyn Monroe… the point is to question how far a friendship of this sort should go, and as far as the movie is concerned, the one line that should not be crossed is sex, pure and simple. I actually seriously wonder if this movie would be made today, especially the long version in which Léon clearly shares a bed with Mathilda – I mean, isn’t this just what Michael Jackson’s under fire for right now? Like Mathilda says, “It’s a great game… it makes you think...”

Writing something along the lines of that last paragraph is what has held me up writing this review – ‘cos like everyone else these days, I feel like I’m going to be shot in the head if I even suggest we should remove the barriers of fear we’ve put up as far as young people and “beauty” goes. That’s all I can really say in a short review but I think there’s a lot of discussion to be done on the subject … somebody actually should make a movie like this again before children are completely outlawed and forced to grow up in seclusion with electrostatic shields or something.

I think this is a great movie… I certainly love watching it. But it could just be the combo of the old memories of watching it when I myself was underage, and the current issues I see in it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 25th, 2004 at 10:35 pm in 5 hearts, Movie Reviews and tagged as cuties, hitman, murder, NYC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.