#maiwenn le besco

[creepynostalgy]

Cécile De France in Haute Tension aka High Tension aka Switchblade Romance (2003)

[filmpalette]

The Fifth Element (1997) dir. Luc Besson

[alphaman99]

Movie and Entertainment Sphere

Why was the movie Léon: The Professional completely ignored and not given any Academy Award nominations?

Leon: The Professional is one of my most favorite movies of all time! Unfortunately, the film was not given much attention for one major reason.

First and foremost, the movie features a relationship between a grown adult and a 12 year old girl. If you watched the American cut, the relationship between Leon and Mathilda is strictly father and daughter.

If you saw the director’s cut, there is a lot of belligerent sexual tension between Mathilda and Leon. More on Mathilda’s behalf, who is in love with Leon because he saved her life. Leon turns down her advances, but she insists because of her deeply disturbing childhood. When the extended release was previewed with a Los Angeles Test Audience, they “hated it for being too sexual.” Mathilda really wants to have sex with Leon as her “first time” because she is too young to understand the problem with that and she’s infatuated with him because he saved her life. Leon is the only stable adult she ever met in her life as her father and stepmother are abusive scumbags.

I assume many people didn’t feel comfortable with the source material? Many critics did call the movie, “pedophilia.” (Luc Besson’s second wife was Maiwenn Le Besco who he started dating when she was 15 and he was 31. She got pregnant the following year.) Perhaps that explains why Luc Besson would re-release the same movie now set in a futuristic science fiction film and call it, The Fifth Element.

Seen this movie? You saw Leon: The Professional.

Honestly, the movie is not underrated! It was a financial success (42 Million with a 12 million dollar budget) and was critically praised as one of the greatest movies of the year! I guess that it’s stuck in small reference pools when people discuss “greatest movies ever” and while it was a success, is nowhere near the levels of popularity like “Star Wars” or “The Lord of the Rings.”

Why I love the movie so much is because it’s an astoundingly excellent film. The acting is amazing, the story is engaging, and the ending is bittersweet. Looking past the entire “SHE’S 12!!!” argument, the movie’s plot is about two loners that you would not expect to ever cross paths help each other grow and mature. Leon is a grown adult with the mentality of a 12 year old child and Mathilda is a little girl with the maturity of a grown woman. They both complement each other and their relationship is honestly a lot more platonic than you might expect. Leon grows into becoming Mathilda’s father by the end of the movie. I wouldn’t dismiss the film as “gross pedophilia” because that is not the message of the film.

Gary Oldman plays one of the greatest villains in cinematic history.

Conclusion: A perfect movie.

Rating: 7 out of 5!

[whippedcloudsofcream]

Maiwenn Le Besco as Plavalaguna in The Fifth Element (1997)

[thatbitchsimone]

[sophs-style]

sophs-style:

Maiwenn le Besco (wearing Chanel) at the ‘ADN’ Premiere at the 46th Deauville American Film Festival on Friday (11th September 2020) in France.

[starfireproductions]

Plavalaguna

Another one for y Fifth Element collection. I love this movie and one of my favourite scenes (well, there’s sooo many) is the opera where Plavalaguna sings an amazing rendition of Lucia di Lammermoor. The character was played by Maiween le Besco but voiced by Inva Mula-Tchako. Fun to experiment with the blues in this project.

Full details can be found on my DA page here: https://www.deviantart.com/starfire-productions

[complistory]

“I have a lot of affection for him, he is a man that I like very much … but nobody should be above the law.” - Luc Besson on Roman Polanski

Besson is an acclaimed director known for his films Le Femme Nikita, Leon: The Professional, The Fifth Element and Lucy.

When Besson was 32 he began a relationship with 15-year-old Maïwenn Le Besco (above) and got her pregnant shortly after.  The relationship fed into his next film, Leon, which featured a scene in the screenplay where the adult protagonist consummates his relationship with a 12-year-old girl.  He eventually left Besco for Milla Jovovich in 1997.

Update: Besson was accused of drugging and raping a 27-year-old woman in May 2018.

[procrastinatorsprovince]

As if we needed further evidence, Besson's wife literally said on the DVD extras that

"Leon is about her relationship with Besson. She says they met while she was still an adolescent, and eventually they started dating when she was fifteen"

stop denying it. leon: the professional is a pedophile’s fantasy that’s loved and protected by rape culture.

I already knew I was right but I’ve come across some information that I’m really late to and holy shit, the validation! 

CONTENT WARNING: PEDOPHILIA & MENTION OF RAPE

“Mehh, the movie can’t be a pedophile fantasy if it’s the child who’s pursuing the adult!" 

First of all… Yes, the fuck it can be! And second, the movie really is a pedophile’s fantasy!

The character Leon (Jean Reno) was only written to be emotionally immature and hesitant to young Mathilda’s (Natalie Portman) constant sexual propositions so that trash human beings can feel more comfortable with openly indulging in this gross fantasy. 

There are people (usually men) who always want to argue and get defensive about this. They’ll try to excuse it because it’s art (which apparently exists in a vacuum and has zero impact in this world) or they’ll just blatantly deny that there���s any hint of pedophilia with some mental gymnastics.

Sure, the movie has bad ass, visually stylish scenes for the 90s. A cold assassin moved by circumstances to care for a traumatized child and help her get revenge on corrupt law enforcement for the murder of her family is a cool, thrilling plot. Portman, at 11-12 years old, excitedly took on this role for these reasons and had to beg her parents to let her do it. This is the movie that really showed off her acting abilities and sparked her illustrious career.  

Of course, some say that we should be more concerned with how a child is involved with graphic gun violence in this film than with the sexual undertones. It’s almost a fair point since our media is actually more comfortable with displaying violence than consensual, healthy images and themes of sex. But sexualizing children isn’t healthy or positive. It’s another kind of violence, that unlike the gun fight scenes, was unnecessary and didn’t really serve the central plot or the characters. (And ew, sexualizing children is just never okay.)

Mathilda’s sharp mind, affection and innate innocence despite her screwed up childhood experiences help Leon and make both of them good character studies. But instead of using a father-daughter relationship, which would have also achieved the art of the characters’ warm development and emotional depth in a grim, violent world (The Last of Us accomplishes this beautifully with critical acclaim), this movie opts for a disturbing romance between the two. 

The subtext for the pedophilia isn’t at all subtle and it’s time to stop excusing or denying it. There are scenes with a prepubescent child calling a 40-something year old man her lover and declaring she wants to have sex with him. So many scenes of her flirting with him and in every one it looks like it hurts him to reject her. And there’s one scene that I’m always surprised people miss. It’s the one where Mathilda is in bed with Leon. As she leaves the bed, she’s pulling up her underwear in a way that implies she wasn’t wearing them before getting out of the sheets. The camera forces the audience to actually watch her do it so that they can see this and infer that something happened.

To validate the icky feelings I got from this movie years ago, I just found out that in the original script, Leon was supposed to see Mathilda completely naked after she gets out of a shower. And while nude she was supposed to try to seduce him into having sex again. In another cut scene, before she gets out of bed and pulls up her underwear, they’re having sex and the script describes it as beautiful love making when, really, it’s not even sex. It’s rape.This little girl, whose family had just been slaughtered and is now alone and vulnerable, ends up in the care of a lonely older man whom she later engages in a romantic and sexual relationship with–and oh by the way, he also happens to be a very skilled assassin. How is that not a pedophile’s fantasy?

If the actual movie and original script aren’t enough to convince you how pedophile-friendly and awful this movie is, I also just learned something about Luc Besson, the writer and director of this cult classic.

Before the movie was released, 30-something year old Besson impregnated and married a 15 year old girl who had been isolated from her family, a girl he’d been grooming since she was 12 years old. If we remove the gun fights, Italian mob, and corrupt DEA agents, the movie almost seems autobiographical. It’s art imitating his life of exploiting little girls.

Luc Besson, despite being a sexual predator who’s sick enough to put a movie in theaters inspired by abusing a minor, hasn’t been criticized at large or shunned from Hollywood. Instead he’s been able to continue making multi-million dollar budget, mainstream films throughout the decades like The Fifth Element (1997), The Transporter series (2002-2015), Taken series (2008-2014), and even movies just within the last couple of years like Lucy (2014) and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017). Lucy 2 is expected to come out some time in 2018-2019.

In January 2018, Natalie Portman attended a women’s march in Los Angeles. In front of a large understanding crowd, Portman shared her own deeply personal story about the first time she realized that she lived in a rape culture that would target, objectify, and abuse her.

When she turned 13, shortly after Leon: The Professional was released, the very first fan mail she ever received was written by an adult man sharing his fantasy of raping her. 

Portman said, “I excitedly opened my first fan mail to read a rape fantasy a man had written me. A countdown was started on my local radio show to my 18th birthday, euphemistically the day I would be legal to sleep with.”

Just let that sink in.

Millie Bobby Brown (Stranger Things) was recently named by magazines “one of TV’s sexiest stars.” She’s only 13 years old. Her co-star Finn Wolfhard, who’s only 14, also has experience with being sexualized by adults. Many on the internet have started counting down for their 18th birthdays. None of this is okay. When it comes to our culture’s toxic treatment of children and marginalized genders, not much has changed in the last 30 years. But there is a growing movement of people calling out their abusers, even in Hollywood and politics, addressing the misogyny and sexual terror that they’ve experienced. 

It’s my hope that someday abusers like Luc Besson, R. Kelly, Woody Allen, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and so many others will finally be held accountable. To make that happen, we have to listen to victims and believe them. We have to stop supporting their abusers with our money, denial, and excuses. It shouldn’t be normal for us to live in a culture that protect and reward predators.

[filmszakertok]

Minőség = csavar, de a színészi játékok az egyik legjobbak. Ez a film egy pocsék. 

Az én szerelmem (2015), dir. Maiwenn Le Besco

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Benjamin Karr - Fifth Element character redesigns.

[vampirekangaroo]

High Tension film review

High Tension film review

Not too long after Haute Tension (2003) came out, the film’s name was translated to High Tension for its American festival circuit run. Some even know the film as Switchblade Romance, but it is most commonly known as High Tension. I believe that the DVD did not make it to video stores until around 2005 in the USA. I remember finding the film one weekend and renting the feature. Around this time a…

[behcette]

My King (Maiwenn Le Besco, 2015)

[whippedcloudsofcream]

Maiwenn Le Besco as Plavalaguna in The Fifth Element (1997)

[thatbitchsimone]