Yes, I have seen Besson's Leon and the similarities with Lolita are indeed very striking (they go from hotel to hotel, too, for instance). There is a director's cut, with app. 20 min. extra footage (available on DVD and Blu-Ray), which the director had to cut for the theatrical release and which contains scenes of the girl falling in love with Leon, the hitman. Nathalie Portman at the time was twelve (!) and her parents were more concerned about the scenes in which she smokes (four) than with the sexual implications ('Actually, he's not my dad; he's my lover.'). Note the scene in which she wakes up next to Leon and pulls her knickers up (in the director's cut this scene is prequeled by one in which she gets drunk on champagne).
Kubrick's version is lame and he himself admitted it. I have never understood his adoration of Peter Sellers.
Adrian Lynne's version is somewhat better in some scenes (the fights between Lo and Hum; Quilty's (played by Langela, who is known for his romantic role as Dracula and who shows his swinging penis in this movie) killing; the famous dialogue on the veranda ('Where the hell did you get her?'). The sequence with Annabel Leigh is horrible! Jeremy Irons is very convincing and the ideal HH, because he has the neurotic qualities of HH and tics which Lo mocks in the novel. It was a good choice of the scenarist/director not to start the movie with the first lines of the book.
The thing is: Nabokov's literary fireworks and unconventionalism should be translated in cinematographic equivalents. In the novel we are inside HH world and mind; in the movie we necessarily see him in the third person. The ideal director should be a HH himself. Someone with the virtuosity, skills, deep knowledge of movies and disrespect for cinematic conventions as Scorsese - just as HH is in regard to literature and language.
Best,
Hafid Bouazza
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