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Film
& Television
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The Professional
A
Fresh View of Intergenerational Relations
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by David Em
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HAVE YOU EVER READ in a newspaper about any movie: "This
Lolita-with-a-Luger setup gets milked for quarts of heartache and
furtive hard-ons. . . enjoyably outrageous, and a pedophile's
paradise"? That's what the San Francisco Bay Guardian has been saying
about Luc Besson's first Hollywood movie, The Professional (called Léon
in France).
 In somewhat of a coup, Besson (the French
director of La Femme Nikita)
has managed to produce a film that explodes some of the current social
and cultural assumptions concerning intergenerational relationships.
This is a must-see movie for boy-lovers, despite the fact that the
12-year-old star, Natalie Portman is female. The movie could not have
acheived distribution in the US with a boy falling in love with the
hitman who saves his life
(as this girl does). The fact that any widely distributed US movie
involves a preteen living with and in love with an adult is amazing.
Beyond that, The Professional gives the youth character a strong voice.
Her initiative and her decisions are the motive force that drives the
movie to its climax. Young Portman is very convincing most of the time
as well as very cute, making the film a guaranteed favorite in every
girl-lover's video collection.
 The director's attention to
Portman's attractiveness prompted, in a
rather smutty review from Newsweek, charges of corruption and
child
pornography (of course, now that the Supreme Court has decided that
pictures of clothed children can be ruled pornography, they may have a
point). Newsweek (November 21, 1994) continues: "See huge
close-ups of
her precociously beautiful face aesthetically bruised and bloodied.
Glom her in a T-shirt, provocatively poked by her budding breasts."
I found the other main character, the "cleaner" played by Jean Reno,
one that both I and probably most boy-lovers can identify with. An
illegal immigrant, he is largely isolated from mainstream America and
its language, which he neither reads nor writes. Solitary and
alienated, he spends his free time at home doting over his one safe,
non-exploiting companion: his house plant. He is, in fact, very
reluctant to get involved with the young character portrayed by Portman.
Finally, The Professional satisfied my feelings of justice. The girl's
family is shown without the usual sentimentality characteristic of
American films. Moreover, the forces of evil, in a movie where none of
the characters are angels, are shown to be the sadistic, dope-pushing
villains from the US Drug Enforcement Agency and the cops. In the end,
the demonized, would-be pervert is revealed to be a hero of sorts, in a
way that speaks directly to Besson's intended, young, audience.
Fair warning: those who have not been desensitized to violence, as most
American moviegoers have, along with those who have a soft spot in
their heart for cops, should avoid this movie. Getting this story
before a mass American audience (one which included a high proportion
of young viewers) required packaging it as a high"action" (read:
violence) film. Although kind-natured boy-lovers may object, the film
could be viewed as a co-optation of the "culture of violence" for
liberatory ends. Besson did what it took to get his film seen, and I,
for one, am glad he did.
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From
NAMBLA Bulletin, Vol. 16, No. 2,
Pg. 42, Aug. 1995.
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Copyright © NAMBLA, 2008
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