Léon: The Professional

Luc Besson's Léon: The Professional opened in 1994 (released in the United States as The Professional) and became one of the most internationally consequential French films of its decade. The film consolidated Jean Reno as a major leading-man career and launched Natalie Portman, then twelve, into her continuing acting career. Besson's work in the broader action-thriller register would extend through subsequent decades; Léon remains one of his most-cited features.

Léon (Jean Reno), a solitary and meticulous hitman of Italian-Sicilian origin operating in New York for a discreet boss named Tony (Danny Aiello), lives in a small Manhattan apartment with a houseplant and an unusual professional ethics. When Mathilda (Natalie Portman, in her debut), a twelve-year-old girl in the apartment next to his, finds her family massacred by a corrupt DEA agent named Norman Stansfield (Gary Oldman, in unhinged form), Léon reluctantly takes her in. The film follows the months of their unlikely cohabitation, Mathilda's request that Léon train her in his profession, and the broader consequences of Stansfield's continuing reach.

The film is shot largely on actual Manhattan locations and operates in a register of stylish action-thriller that mixes European art-cinema sensibilities (Tilman Büttner's photography, Eric Serra's score) with American-genre conventions. The film's reception across the years since release has been complicated by the question of how the central relationship between Léon and Mathilda should be read, a question Portman herself has discussed publicly in subsequent decades. Reno and Oldman's central performances anchor the film's continuing emotional register.