_The Professional_ reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs Call this The Year of the Little Girl. Okay, less ambitiously, the Two Weeks of the Little Girl. After Kirsten Dunst has stolen the vampire movie from Cruise and Pitt, comes Natalie Portman as a precocious child in Luc Besson's _The Professional_. Like Dunst, Portman has the difficult task of portraying a young girl's sexuality without crossing MPAA ratings lines, and a strong (if ambiguously portrayed) supporting male cast, including Jean Reno as the object of her affection, a single-minded hitman named Leon, and Gary Oldman as a deliriously corrupt DEA officer. Precocious-childness is a difficult effect to get right. There's always the danger of situations becoming annoying or cloying. While this film has its predictable moments, it's saved from some serious sentimental tendencies (charming girl and hulking social loser: consider the potential for disaster) in part by the perversity of its basic plot. I read this plot and its corresponding imagery ironically. And I've had conversations with others who are offended by the repeated "crotch-shots'' of Portman, and the irresolution of her romantic desires. Points taken. Still, I think that there is a way that the film's lack of substantive exploration of her desires makes another point, one that implicates its audience in the process of anticipating and reading such sexuality. We know it's there, in texts ranging from Shirley Temple movies to _Alice in Wonderland_ to _The Little Mermaid_ to _Interview With The Vampire_. This movie makes the acknowledgement of it both pleasurable and discomforting (or more precisely, discomforting because it is at least somewhat pleasurable), and I don't think it lets anyone off the hook. Upon returning from a job (which he handles with a scary balance of poise and ferocity) Leon meets the bloody-nosed, cigarette-smoking Mathilda (Portman), a neighbor in his apartment building. When her family is massacred by DEA agents (for some profound infraction of drug-dealing etiquette), she seeks refuge with Leon across the hall. Her extreme vulnerability is disturbing, especially as it corresponds with her not-so-nascent sexuality. They forge a desperate relationship, driven by her non-negotiable desire for revenge on the bad cops and his big-dumb-galoot inability to resist her requests. Clearly, their alliance is light years from Temple and Adolphe Menjou's sweet-surfaced romance in _Little Miss Marker_, which, again, hinted at a similar relationship, where Temple professed her love for Menjou in sort of asexual terms. To underline however, the problem raised by _The Professional_ is viewers' complicity in a contract which allows them to "know'' about child- sexuality but also deny it in the name of (child and viewer) innocence. This complicity is framed as denial, such as the denial of sexuality in _Pee-wee's Playhouse_ or in Michael Jackson's life-career. To focus on this relationship, the film alludes to its secondary characters as broad outlines (so that corpses-to-be are rendered with precious few strokes, they wear too much make-up or cheap suits, thus they're not worth fretting about). Working some familiar nerves, _The Professional_ is less concerned with environmental details than with citing and slightly twisting types we know from other movies (and of course, getting to those climactic big-violence scenes, of which there are several). The central, easily despised villain is the flamboyant Ben. Oldman gives an over-the-top, addicted-to-blood performance, aided by some grandly evocative camerawork (shooting him from above as he grimaces and gesticulates, spinning around him as he confronts his victims: realism is not the framework here). Because Ben is so ruthlessly pathological, Leon looks relatively sane, and certainly safe. Mathilde makes the right choice. And she surprises the stoic Leon with her passion, expressing a rage at her loss (not even of her parents - they were creeps - but of her four- year-old brother), in order to convince him to show her how to "clean.' He's a hard case, a meticulous Frenchman displaced in New York City, moving every week to a new hotel room, unable to sleep at nights, getting his assignments from a smooth-operating local mobster (Danny Aiello). To highlight Leon's cool pathology (well, Mathilda thinks it's extremely cool), the men's meetings are played as rituals of mutual repression standing in for self-control. Super tight close-ups show their swirling cigarette smoke, their shadowed eyes, their beard stubbles: trapped in a relationship that grants him no emotional outlet (except, of course, for the overcharged violence we see unleashed during some impeccably choreographed assassinations), Leon is clearly ready for love. Still, Mathilda's assumption of their coupledom quite unnerves him. She's dressed up in punky-sexy outfits (not unlike those worn by Anne Paudrillard in Besson's _La Femme Nikita_, another film that trips on stylized violence as substitute sex, with a tough child- woman as the vehicle for moral conflict), seductive but at the same time innocent, disturbingly adorable. She plays a game of charades where she acts out a series of famous pop-cultural moments (Madonna-as-material-girl, John Wayne-sauntering, Monroe-on-the- subway-grate, Chaplin-twitching), and Leon doesn't get them (illiterate and obsessive, he only does what he does, unthinking, instinctual, neanderthal; yet there's the paradox of his skill in killing, which involves some careful thinking through). Mathilda's campy show does two things: it underlines her baby-sexiness and it establishes that she's a child raised by television, that all her ethical or emotional references are fictions. In other words, she represents those "bad influences'' that trigger censors' alarms. The fact of her celluloid existence forces an industry question. Is she allowable because Besson movies don't have mass-market appeal? Because the relationship can pass as father- daughter? Because her motivation resembles an Eastwoodian or Stallonish search for justice? I'm guessing that her consummate cute-little-white-girlness makes her more acceptable than other characters who have been snipped by movie-moral guardians. Good for her. Eventually, Mathilda begins mimicking Leon's regimens (doing sit-ups in their cramped apartment, watching over his single object of affection, a potted plant), drinks and eats with him (milk and Ronzoni only: all his routines are absolute and minimal), and practices aiming a high-powered rifle at joggers from the rooftop. He discourages her payback plotting, but soon it's clear that she's at least as methodical and determined as her mentor. There's a tension here, between the film's interest in her titillating precociousness and its respect for her combined naivete and gritty self-awareness. She's a rare young girl character, vulnerable and angry, intelligently alive. Cynthia Fuchs teaches film and media studies at George Mason University. Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author. This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.