History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. So, apparently, do the films of Luc Besson. In 1992 he made "La Femme Nikita," which in its cold sadness told the story of a tough street girl who became a professional killer and then a civilized woman. Now he has made "The Professional," about a tough child who wants to become a professional killer, and civilizes the man she chooses as her teacher.

Besson seems fascinated by the "Pygmalion" story, by the notion of a feral street person who is transformed by education. He crosses that with what seems to be an obsession with women who kill as a profession. These are interesting themes, and if "The Professional" doesn't work with anything like the power of "La Femme Nikita," it is because his heroine is 12 years old, and we cannot persuade ourselves to ignore that fact. It colors every scene, making some unlikely and others troubling.

The film opens with one of those virtuoso shots which zips down the streets of New York and in through a door, coming to a sudden halt at a plate of Italian food and then looking up at its owner. Besson must have been watching the opening of the old Letterman show. The man eating the food is a mob boss, played by Danny Aiello, who wants to put a contract on a guy. The man who has come whizzing through the streets is Leon (Jean Reno), a skillful but uneducated "cleaner," or professional hitman.

We see him at work, in opening scenes of startling violence and grim efficiency. In the course of the movie, Leon will, in effect, adopt his neighbor Matilda (Natalie Portman), a tough, streetwise, 12-yearold girl. She escapes to Leon's nearby apartment after her family has been wiped out by a crooked top DEA enforcer named Stansfield (Gary Oldman), who wants to kill her too. Matilda wants to hire Leon to avenge the death of her little brother; in payment, she offers to do his laundry.

Leon wants nothing to do with the girl, but she insists, and attaches herself like a leech. Eventually she develops an ambition to become a cleaner herself. And their fate plays out like those of many another couple on the lam, although with that 30-year age difference.

Matilda is played with great resourcefulness by Portman, who is required by the role to be, in a way, stronger than Leon. She has seen so many sad and violent things in her short life, and in her dysfunctional family, that little in his life can surprise her. She's something like the Jodie Foster character in "Taxi Driver," old for her years. Yet her references are mostly to movies: "Bonnie and Clyde didn't work alone," she tells him. "Thelma and Louise didn't work alone. And they were the best." (To find a 12-yearold in 1994 who knows "Bonnie and Clyde" is so extraordinary that it almost makes everything else she does plausible.) So Leon finds himself saddled with a little sidekick, just when the manic Stansfield is waging a personal vendetta against him.

Although "The Professional" bathes in grit and was shot in the scuzziest locations New York has to offer, it's a romantic fantasy, not a realistic crime picture. Besson's visual approach gives it a European look; he finds Paris in Manhattan. That air of slight displacement helps it get away with various improbabilities, as when Matilda teaches Leon to read (in a few days, apparently), or when Leon is able to foresee the movements of his enemies with almost psychic accuracy.

This gift is useful during several action sequences in "The Professional," when Leon, alone and surrounded by dozens if not hundreds of law officers, is able to conceal himself in just such a way that when the cops enter an apartment in just such a manner, he can swing down from the ceiling, say, and blast them. Or he can set a trap for them. Or he can apparently teleport himself from one part of an apartment to another; they think they have him cornered, but he's behind them. So many of the movie's shoot-outs unfold so conveniently for him that they seem choreographed. The Oldman character sometimes seems to set himself up to be outsmarted, while trying to sneak up on Leon in any way not actually involving chewing through the scenery.

The premise "La Femme Nikita" was that its heroine began as a thoroughly uncivilized character without a decent bone in her body, and then, after society exploited her savagery, she was slowly civilized through the love of a good, simple man. "The Professional" uses similar elements, rearranged. It is a well-directed film, because Besson has a natural gift for plunging into drama with a charged-up visual style. And it is well acted.

But always at the back of my mind was the troubled thought that there was something wrong about placing a 12-year-old character in the middle of this action. In a more serious movie, or even in a human comedy like Cassavetes' "Gloria," the child might not have been out of place. But in what is essentially an exercise - a slick urban thriller - it seems to exploit the youth of the girl without really dealing with it.

Accordion music makes me feel happy. Heaven, if I am given a choice, will include an Italian restaurant with an outdoor patio, shaded by a grape arbor, under which large plates of spaghetti are served while an accordion plays in the twilight ("Arrivederci Roma," please).

There is a lot of accordion music in "Arizona Dream" - too much for most people, I suppose, especially since the song is usually "Besame Mucho," played over and over, sometimes to turtles. But I am forgiving, especially since the accordion player is the irreplaceable Lili Taylor, with a cigarette stuck in her mug.

Here is a movie containing wonderful sights. Ambulances to the moon. Unsuccessful suicide by bungee cord. Johnny Depp. A dog saving a man from death in the Arctic. Faye Dunaway. Turtles crawling through meatballs. Jerry Lewis. A man who counts fish. Paulina Porizkova. Airplanes that look like they were borrowed from "Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines." Michael J. Pollard.

"Arizona Dream" is one of those movies that slips through the cracks. Hollywood bureaucracy has been established precisely to prevent films like this from being made. And yet it was made, and it is goofier than hell - you can't stop watching because nobody in the audience, and possibly nobody on the screen, has any idea what's going to happen next.

The movie was directed by Emir Kusturica, a Yugoslavian (if such a place still exists), whose "Time of the Gypsies" (1989) won the best director award at Cannes. In his world, strange magic happens. People want to fly, and sometimes they can. Eccentricity is prized. That earlier film followed a gypsy family as it traveled through Yugoslavia and Italy, taking its occult knowledge with it.

Now Kusturica has come to Arizona, which he sees as a similar land of enchantment.

The story involves Johnny Depp as a fish-counter who works in New York harbor: "Most people think I count fish, but I don't. I listen to their dreams." He is summoned west by an uncle (Jerry Lewis), who runs a Cadillac dealership near Tucson and wants his nephew to continue the family business. Depp arrives reluctantly, uninterested in cars, fascinated by the dreams of fish, to find his uncle preparing to wed a young girl (Candyce Mason). "He's trying to teach me to stop crying," she helpfully explains to Depp, during a fitting for a wedding gown.

Depp has never much liked his uncle ("He reminded me of the smell of car dealers' cheap cologne; he always looked like a 10-year-old boy whose sleeves were too long"). But he decides to stay for a time, and one day an exotic sight appears at the car lot: Faye Dunaway, widow of a rich miner, with her stepdaughter, played by Lili Taylor. Depp and Dunaway immediately feel a deep gravitational pull, and Depp finds himself out at their ranch, engaged in torrid lust, while Taylor wanders in the yard, playing the accordion.

What happens next, involving airplanes and ambulances, turtles and yo-yo suicides, I dare not say. There is a talent show at which someone does a credible imitation of Cary Grant during the crop-dusting scene in "North by Northwest." And strange scenes on rooftops and treetops in thunderstorms.

Needless to say, Warner Bros., having somehow made this film, is not going to encourage such a lapse by releasing it, and so it can only be seen on the specialized circuit. The version opening tonight at the Film Center of the Art Institute of Chicago is the director's cut - some 20 minutes longer, I am told, than the version I saw in September at the Telluride Film Festival. I could not tell you which 20 minutes have been added, but at 142 minutes one does not long for it to be longer.

What we are dealing with here is a filmmaker who has his own peculiar vision of the world, and it does not correspond to the weary write-by-numbers formulas of standard screenplays. If he has a guide, it might be his fellow Yugoslavian Dusan Makavejev, whose own films show a similar cheerful mix of odd people and strange inventions. The movie is completely batty, and better suited probably to a giggly 1960s audience than to today's grim seekers after cinematic value for money.

Public Enemy Number One: Part 1
(Mesrine: L'Instinct De Mort)

Dir: Jean-Francois Richet. 2008. Fr-Can-It. 113mins.

The first installment of the two-part biopic devoted to Jacques Mesrine (1936–1979) is a whirlwind introduction to the charismatic career criminal who became a household name in France. Despite an abrupt narrative approach, formative episodes in Mesrine's larger-than-life reign flow together well enough to yield a frequently gripping whole. Vincent Cassel's performance, which entailed gaining and losing over 40 pounds to resemble Mesrine over the span of two decades, is excellent in the service of a tale marbled with action, violence and brass balls chutzpah.

Hitting French screens Oct 22, Part 1 is a free-standing entertainment that whets the appetite for Part 2 (Nov 19). While Gallic and Canadian audiences should show strong interest (Mesrine was Public Enemy Number One in Quebec before earning that status back in his native France), widely sold saga may present a marketing challenge in other territories. But there's always room for good accounts of bad men - Al Capone didn't have a publicist but his name resonates the world over.

During tense opening credits a man and woman load items into the boot of a car and head off into Paris traffic circa 1979. Moments after driver Mesrine (Cassel) remarks to his passenger that he was born not far from that very spot, the couple are fatally ambushed by police. The split second border between ordinary activities and explosive violence characterizes the entire film to come.

The action cuts straight to Algeria in 1959 where young Mesrine, a soldier in the French army, takes part in a brutal interrogation. Discharged and back in the Paris suburb of Clichy, he doesn't stay long in his parents' comfortable bourgeois home. His dad has a job lined up for Jacques in a lace factory, a prospect the viewer knows is risible even if his ineffectual father doesn't.

With childhood buddy Paul (Lellouche) who works for crime boss Guido (Depardieu), Jacques meets Pigalle prostitute Sarah (Thomassin) whose honour he later recklessly defends. Initiated by Paul in the ways of burglary and robbery, Jacques' knack for quick thinking is swiftly revealed.

Jacques falls for Spanish beauty Sofia (Anaya) in 1960. After doing time in a French prison, he lives with her and their three children but when legit work dries up, Mesrine again takes up arms for Guido and never looks back.

An already lively, if episodic, narrative really picks up in Paris in 1966 when Jacques meets Jeanne (De France), who's as violent and fearless as he is. Two years later, with police and rivals literally gunning for him, Jacques escapes to Montreal with Jeanne. An escapade with their wealthy employer lands the couple in prison. After surviving the spectacular indignities of solitary confinement in a Canadian penitentiary – a harrowing primer on why crime does not pay and rehabilitation doesn't work -- Mesrine ingeniously busts out with buddy Mercier (Dupuis).

While Mesrine's exploits make for good theater, the film-makers don't judge their subject or attempt to spell out his motivations. Mesrine is never glorified. He may be despicable, but he's a man of his word, right down to returning to a prison from which he's escaped to spring others.

In limited screen time, De France radiates love and passion. Filmed in close-up during a covert phonecall, she nails the heartbreaking complexity of being emotionally committed to a homicidal hothead.

Boldly employing mosaic screen effects, the film is stylish but not ostentatiously so.

Public Enemy Number One: Part 2
(Mesrine: L'Ennemi Public N° 1)

Dir: Jean-Francois Richet. 2008. Fr-Can-It. 132mins.

Public Enemy Number One: Part 2 is a relentless portrait of Mesrine in his Scarface-like prime as he tips over into half-baked political motivations and continues his tightrope act between living life to the full and catapulting toward his inexorable fate. Bloody shoot-outs, daring escapes - from a courtroom in mid-trial, from prison, from an impressive manhunt - and grandstanding for the press illustrate Mesrine's assurance and arrogance with expedient strokes.

There have been too many fact-inspired movies about rebellious bank robbers (The Bank Job, Le Dernier Gang to name but two) for this material to feel entirely new, but Jean-François Richet has made two pictures that complement and build on each other with widescreen verve.

Anyone still wondering why they should care about this guy after Part 1 will get a rousing reply in the highlights of Mesrine's final six years of sangfroid and bravado. Even when cornered or captured, as he is by police nemesis Broussard (Gourmet) long before he gets his man for good, Mesrine takes his temporary defeat in stride. In custody in March of 1973, Mesrine strenuously denies knowing gangster Michel Ardouin (Le Bihan). They know each other alright, as a breathless escape and shooting spree energetically demonstrate.

In a long sequence shot and edited for maximum suspense, Mesrine later breaks out of prison with fellow convict François Besse (Amalric). Besse prefered to keep a low profile. Mesrine, conversely, was something of a pioneer in media manipulation, admitting to over 40 murders is an autobiography he published from prison before going on trial. Throughout Part 2 Mesrine willingly feeds his own legend.

Mesrine rarely resorted to disguise in the period covered in Part 1, robbing banks unmasked. In Part 2, now dubbed 'the man of a thousand faces,' he repeatedly walks into the lion's den – posing as a doctor to visit his dying father or disguised as a police inspector to make a few pointed inquiries at the Deauville police station before knocking off the local casino.

Because criminals commit crimes, there's a certain degree of repetition here. Bored with his own prowess and ever the provocateur, Mesrine takes superficial inspiration from the Red Brigades, the Palestinian struggle and the Baader Meinhof gang to beef up his rhetoric. There's an unfortunate whiff of Pretty Woman in the sequences where Mesrine and new girlfriend Sylvia (Sagnier) buy a BMW off the showroom floor and pay cash for costly baubles in Paris's Place Vendome. The nominally fun side of being public enemy number one does, however, underline the extraordinary fact that Mesrine was able to hide in plain sight for so long.

Part 2 ends as Part 1 began, with Mesrine shot down in very cold blood without a hint of legal preliminaries.

As played by Amalric, Besse's compact intensity makes him an unlikely but interesting partner-in-crime for the flamboyant Mesrine. Gerard Lanvin as extreme left-wing activist Charlie Bauer exudes all-or-nothing conviction on a wavelength that seems almost quaint three decades later. Sagnier is fun-loving, game and vulnerable.

After four hours in his presence it's difficult to imagine anyone but Cassel as the many faces of Mesrine.