Leon cleans his little potted plant every day, spraying water on the leaves and wiping them down like he’s bathing his child.

“You love your plant, don’t you?” Matilda asks.

“It’s my best friend,” he responds. “Always happy. No questions. And it’s like me, you see? No roots.”

Roots: he has none (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This man speaking so tenderly of his plant is an immigrant, root-less, alone in the city of New York. He is a hitman. He likes milk and Singin in the Rain. In Luc Besson’s thriller Leon the Professional, Jean Reno plays Leo, an assassin who finds his lonely life of murder for hire interrupted by the events down the hall from his apartment. Maybe murder’s not the right word. After all, he’s a professional.

After coming home to find her family murdered by corrupt DEA cop Norman Stansfield (Gary Oldman) and his crew over cocaine dealings, Mathilda Lando (a young, precocious Natalie Portman) seeks refuge with Leo, her up-to-then unknown neighbor. Leo, who seems to foresee an intrusion into his solitary rhythm of life, takes a moment to consider Mathilda through the keyhole before grudgingly allowing her inside. From this point, the foul-mouthed yet devoted Mathilda slowly draws Leo out of his shell as she talks him into teaching her the ways of the hitman. The two eventually come head to head with Stansfield as Mathilda seeks revenge for her slain brother—the only one she really loved out of her family members.

With Leo living in a gritty, multicultural corner of Little Italy, Besson’s New York is anything but glamorous. Shots of the world outside Leo’s apparent seem suffused with a yellow hue, as if a thick carpet of dust had been collecting behind the lens. But even more than the setting, it’s the people in Besson’s film that give us a glimpse into New York’s underside. At the beginning of the film, we learn that Mathilda has both been truant from her school for troubled young girls and is the subject of abuse from her father, and neglect from everyone else except her little brother. And Leon? That’s right, don’t look for happy characters here. Having fled to America after murdering his forbidden love’s father, Leo has not had a relationship with a woman—or, it seems, anyone who doesn’t end up on the wrong end of his gun or knife—for over a decade. And despite the almost ludicrous nature of Oldman’s villain, it’s not difficult to imagine some parallels with police corruption in New York’s history.

Stan clarifies his statement

Both Leon’s and Mathilda’s stories tell us the importance of taking root somewhere. From what I hear, many of the old ethnic boundaries that once divided New York have given way to gentrification. But a quick walk down a few blocks down from my apartment lets me see the deep roots that still cling in the city, and those that have formed more recently. Go down one block—Hispanic district. 2 more—Chinatown. Go even further and you’ll hit a neighborhood of Orthodox Jews, a discovery I made one Sunday morning after getting off at the wrong subway stop. It’s the desire to know you’re growing in familiar soil—something a quiet, milk-loving hitman finds in a chain-smoking girl outside his doorstep.

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Though I stated in a previous post that I would be reviewing movies in general, I decided to hone in on a specific topic in order to better match the tone of Campus Clipper. Therefore, I’ll be focusing on movies centered on or dealing with the city of New York. Considering that almost every movie either takes place in New York from the beginning or has the characters go there during the climax—because lets face it, New York City is always the first target during an alien invasion, and love stories just don’t cut it unless they’re New York stories—the options are almost limitless. But I’m going to focus on movies that gave me the strongest sense of New York—the ones that you can watch and say that’s New York even before the first shot of Central Park or the Empire State Building. First up in the list is Rob Reiner’s well-loved romantic comedy, When Harry Met Sally.

Out of all the films that I could have chosen as my first, When Harry Met Sally stood out inexplicably from the rest. Screenwriter Nora Ephron’s and director Rob Reiner’s take one the age-old question of “can men and women really be friends” savors of New York from the moment Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) first part ways at the Washington Square Arch to when Crystal decides to run after her while standing under it. But its more than just the location. Sure, take out the shots of Central Park, Katz’s Deli, and the Metropolitan Museum, and you’re left with another romantic comedy about two young people who take ninety minutes to finally get around to liking each other—an epidemic that Hollywood’s carried to an untold number of cities.

The first time I saw the movie, I knew instantly that this must be how people live in New York. Not L.A. or Seattle or London. They go powerwalking in the park and eat hot dogs at street carts. They wonder about the emptiness of being single while surrounded by people at every avenue. The real draw of the movie, though, isn’t that Reiner has his characters work out these universal problems against the backdrop of New York. It’s that life in The City makes these questions all the more pertinent, especially for college-age individuals such as ourselves.

Harry and Sally are both well-off professionals with at least a handful of close friendships. Why, then, can’t they be satisfied with being just friends? Could it be boredom? At least the first 20 years of our lives are set off as a sort of constant challenge—a hoped-for transition from complete dependence to independence. There’s the various stages of compulsory education, then college, then career. And then what? Once you graduate college, most of your ties to your closest friends are severed, and you’re faced with the terrifying prospect of forming an entirely new circle in an unknown city. Sure, you can make some good friends in time. If you’re lucky, you might even like your job and decide to devote your life to singlehandedly transforming that little corner shop into a multinational money maker. But even so, you have to think, can’t help but realize at some point, that you have fifty years or so to kill until you die (add ten if you happen to live in Japan or Denmark). The thought of having to whittle away at all those hours, days, and years alone is truly terrifying.

Maybe that’s why no religion mandates celibacy (priests are married to God, I suppose). Because Jesus and Buddha and all the others knew that even scarier than the thought of some distant eternity of punishment is the idea of sixty years of sitting at home alone with late-night television, murder mysteries, and cats for company. “Celibacy?” they must have thought. “We’d lose the fan base in a second!”

I don’t know what this means for us as people about to embark on our own lives as functioning members of society. I’m not saying shave your head and find yourself a nice cave to begin your life as a hermit. Nor am I telling you to get out of their chair and go find yourself a wife or husband so you don’t end up a cat lady—or cat man, the lesser-known cousin of the same species. While I’m telling you what I’m not telling you, I should also say that I am still out on the question of whether men or women can be friends. I’m inclined to think the answer is no, but watch When Harry Met Sally, and then this video. And then you’ll agree with me.

For those of you who do believe in friendship between the sexes–bring a friend out to fete coffee for some stimulating conversation over pastries!

In Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, Owen Wilson rubs shoulders with the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, all while musing about man’s dissatisfaction with his place in time. Though viewers may consider such existential crises standard Allen fare, Owen’s turn as the deep, insecure writer departs from his usual role as the still insecure yet shallow bachelor. He broods, he vacillates, he jokes drily. We know its Allen who’s doing the talking, but with Wilson as the mouth it comes off lighter and more optimistic than usual.

Wilson’s Gil Pender is a Hollywood screenwriter and closeted novelist on vacation in Paris with fiancée Inez (Wedding Crashers costar and love interest Rachel McAdams) and her parents. As Inez and her wealthy parents live the high life at upscale restaurants, Gil feels an itching to go off and wander the streets of Paris, which he claims is most beautiful in the rain. This is trademark Allen—during an interview, he once mentioned that London’s rainy weather best suited his personality.

Gil in Rain

But with Gil, we see something more than Allen’s trademark melancholy. We see romanticism, the same kind that brings the fictitious Tom Baxter to life in Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo. As with the main character in that film, though, we see the ridiculousness of Gil’s romantic notions. How else but by sheer absurdity could Gil find himself pulled into a 1920s cab one night and transported to the world of Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Hemingway?

Gil, who has been nursing his novel for years without letting anyone read it, brings it to the house of Gertrude Stein where he meets Pablo Picasso’s charming young mistress Adriana (Marion Cotillard). Though Inez can’t understand why Gil centers his novel on an antiquities shop filled with what she no doubt considers worthless junk, Adriana feels drawn to Gil and his pining for the past. As Gil returns night after night to 1920s Paris to continue seeing Adriana while meeting other notables like Dali (Adrien Brody) and the surrealists, Inez is secretly having an affair with Paul (Michael Sheen), her friend’s pedantic husband. Like Gil, we don’t want this pleasant dream to end. Like Gil, we know it must.

Looking at Allen’s work as a whole, it can be difficult to separate the man from the comic persona. He’s mastered the art of studied dissatisfaction, of not getting too excited because you know you’ll just spoil it later—or something will do it for you. As contrived as that might be, you can’t help but think that it has some basis in the real Allen, though maybe film is just his way of rising above the melancholy.

Midnight in Paris isn’t necessarily a happy movie, but it is an optimistic one. Gil has to let go of a few notions by the end of the movie, and his trip to France’s belle époque with Adriana reveals the impossibility of trying to be completely happy with the age  you were born in. However, Gil’s statement near the end of the movie is the most telling: in the same way that we long to escape our present by looking to the past, future generations may look to our own era as the best of times. Does this mean we should be happy living in our  time? Probably not. Allen revels in half-unhappiness, so it would be too much to say he’s telling us that things are fine. But we can’t let our longing for the past stop us living and advancing. We too will be longed for someday. Years from now, when person-to-person communication has become all but obsolete, our phones will sit inside antique shop windows, and passersby will stop and say, “How quaint those people were, at that time. How charming it all was!