Colette's Birthday: The Professional

Early last month I got into an argument with a friend of mine about this iconic film from my childhood. We were talking about what I should screen this month and she suggested the Professional. I looked her dead in the face and waited to see if she would realize why there's no way I'd play that film (no matter how much I loved it as a 15 year old), but she only stared back in confusion.

A 12 year old Natalie Portman.

Let me pause this story to tell you about my experience watching the Professional as a teen. Never before had I seen a movie whose protagonist was a girl so close to my own age. She was badass, and I loved her. Now, let me tell you what happened when I revisited the Professional in my twenties: I was creeped the fuck out. When I was 15, I was totally unaware of exactly how sexual the relationship between Leon and Mathilda was, but in my twenties it was very obvious. [Though to be fair to 15 year old Colette, the version I was watching in my 20s I might have been the European cut where the pedophilia is much more explicit.] From what I can remember (because I haven't watched it since then) Leon comes off as being very restrained about his "feelings" for Mathilda even though she (as a 12 year old) makes blatant passes at him, and by the end of the film Leon is basically portrayed as a saint because he doesn't sleep with her. This movie I had thought was about a badass girl was actually a movie about how men are tempted by engaging sexually with children, not because the men are vile, but because the underage girls are actively seducing them.

Now back to my argument with my friend; she was INSISTENT that I was wrong about my more recent take on the film. After all, she had watched the Professional a multitude of times in her youth and never picked up on pedophilia. She (like 15 year old me) saw the Leon/Mathilda relationship as a father/daughter master/protege sort of dynamic, and my friend was absolutely not pleased that I would insinuate otherwise. (Fifteen year old me would agree with her completely).

But then a few days later, this article about director Luc Besson came through my feed. The whole thing confirms my stance, but especially this bit:

"Besson [32 at the time] did not only date a minor, he also impregnated her. At the age of 16, Besco gave birth to Besson’s daughter, Shanna Besson. Besson has never actually been convicted for statutory rape because he is from France, and the age of consent there is 15. In his own country, he isn’t legally guilty of the crime, but does that really excuse anyone from preying on a minor? Keep in mind that the age of sexual consent in France is 15, but a minor is still anyone under the age of 18."

When I shared this article with my friend, this was her response: "Why does everything I loved as a kid turn out to be about pedophilia?!"

Honestly, same.

But let's unpack that a bit. Firstly, as kids there's no context for us to notice the sexualization of characters in film, so when we revisit things as adults we're blindsided by it having been there at all. Secondly, there's always been precious little positive representation of girls in film (never mind women), so when we see that representation we often overlook lots of problems simply because we don't have anything to compare. Combine those two factors and you have this really fucked up layer-cake of conditioning. We're taught to turn a blind eye to being sexualized, that our self-worth must be tied to the approval of the men around us, brutality against us is normalized (so we don't resist it in real life), we're conditioned to not question the actions of questionable men, and so so much more unpleasantness. And for the filmmaker, making films like this has a dual purpose: they obviously get to watch their deepest fantasies played out on screen but also, they're able to condition a large group of potential victims all at once. Nothing legitimizes something like being projected on a screen, larger than life and lit the fuck up.

Unless you count the deafening silence of society at large where there should be collective outcry, that's what actually legitimizes these shit stains.

But, these are not just problems that women face while watching movies, in the above scenario you could substitute any marginalized group of people for women and many points would still hold true. There's an excellent episode of Master of None (yes, I know) that touches on Short Circuit 2's use of brown face and how deeply problematic that is. They also talk about and how fooled they were as kids about the wholesomeness of that character. (Ansari (again, I know) wrote a great Times piece on the topic that you can read here.) But that's just one example; there's a multitude of tropes applied to LGBTQA characters, Native American characters, disabled characters, Black characters, et al. that seed deeply in viewers problematic notions of the real world people being depicted. And as I mentioned before, the real life people being depicted in those tropes internalize those harmful stereotypes, making for some fucked up stuff to have to unlearn later in life.

A 12 year old Natalie Portman 

But I digress, The Professional is a deeply fucked up movie*, however it's not the only fucked up movie. Nor is Besson the only fucked up filmmaker still making films. And enjoying fucked up things before you realized they're fucked up isn't the problem; the real problem starts when we ignore that those things are fucked up after people start exposing them to be fucked up. We need to start having productive conversations about how our faves are problematic, and we need to start listening to each other when those conversations happen. Seriously, I don't want yet another generation of girls (or anyone else for that matter) to grow up and realize that while watching movies in those sweet respites from life, that they were being conditioned to be preyed upon by others.




*The first comment on that article points to this Cracked list where the Professional appears in the #1 spot. What it reveals is absolutely fucked up, and unequivocally damning.