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.”

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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