There's something about the Gallic sensibility that is at odds with all things American. Perhaps it's the unusual combination of wryness and fanciful excesses. Americans have a hard time wrapping their intellects around the juxtaposition of understatement and overstatement. The French revel in it, and so do those that follow Luc Besson's views and understandings.

But with La Femme Nikita, French writer/director Luc Besson discovered that American movie audiences found the combination more palatable wrapped up in the guise of an action film. Armed with that knowledge he's now made his first American film, The Professional, and it is a wildly successful picture, managing to combine mayhem and carnage with hilarity and extraordinary tenderness. The title of course, changed from its European script to adjust and attract itself to the American people.

The Story When 12-year-old Matilda's, (Natalie Portman) family is killed as a result of a drug deal gone bad, she takes refuge with her reclusive neighbor, Leon, (Jean Reno). She hardly knows him, but through their lean, pithy hallway conversations, they have discovered a kinship. Instinctively, she trusts him, even when she discovers that he is a professional killer.

It is at this point that Besson seals the movie's success, taking this improbable pairing and making something logical out of it. Despite his profession, there is something so solid, so scrupulous about Leon, that we are immediately drawn to him. Matilda understands this, too, and intuitively places her trust in this glum and nerdy man. Soon, she blossoms in the peaceful routine of Leon's guarded home life.

Leon changes, as well, slowly discovering the rewards of affection and contact with a trusting human being. And finally, in an unspeakably odd twist that comes to seem totally believable, Leon gives in to Matilda's pleading and agrees to teach her his trade. Understandable, she wants revenge. And he is the one person who can provide her with the tools to accomplish it.

Besson doesn't resolve the mini-mysteries of the story the way an American director might. How, for example, and why did Leon (obviously an illegal French immigrant) take refuge in the United States? Besson leaves the answers hanging. These simply aren't vital issues to him. This is not so much a movie with mysteries to be solved as it is a story about relationships, a curious sort of love story. Unlike most action films, The Professional is a movie built around character studies.

And Besson is masterful at this. Longtime Besson collaborator Jean Reno plays Leon as a galootish spectre of death, his gawky features providing an image that is both laughable and filled with elegant melancholy. At the other end of the spectrum is Gary Oldman, playing a rogue DEA agent, (Norman Stansfield), behind all the killing. Oldman is a frightening screen presence, a portrait of goodness debauched, of a nightmare come to life.

But it is 12-year-old Natalie Portman that provides the movie's glue and its spark and its magnificently eccentric twist. Though this is her screen debut, it is an audacious performance. She combines a plethora of seemingly incompatible qualities: androgyny and sexuality; sensitivity and an acceptance of extraordinary violence; silliness and somberness. In fact, there is an ambiguity in the relationship between her and Leon that may make audiences extremely uncomfortable. There is a love between the two that is more than parent/child, even if it is not that of lovers.

Like Matilda, Besson is filled with the unexpected and the unpredictable. More important, he makes it all seem utterly credible. He has a mystifying way of mixing belly laughs with brutality, delicacy with ferocity. It is an effect that is simply breathtaking, both in its abominations and in its loveliness.