Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Ana Lily Amirpour
Starring: Jun Jong-Seo, Kate Hudson, Ed Skrein, Evan Whitten, Craig Robinson
Sometimes originality is over-rated. Writer/director
Ana Lily Amirpour's first two films –
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
and
The Bad Batch
– felt like unique creations, but I didn't particularly care for either
of them. Her third feature, Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, is as derivative a movie as you could imagine, but I had fun with
it.
In interviews, Amirpour, who was born in Britain to an Iranian family
before moving to the US as a child, has spoken about how she fell in
love with American pop culture. And boy does it show in this
slobberingly affectionate homage to Hollywood movies of the '80s and
'90s.
One of the staple storylines of that era was the fish out of water.
Whether it was a cop from the mean streets of Detroit adjusting to life
in Beverly Hills or any number of aliens, robots and time travelers
figuring out what a microwave is for, Hollywood movies mined this
premise for all it was worth.
Amirpour's fish out of water is Mona Lisa Lee (Jeon Jong-seo), a
young Korean woman being held in a psychiatric institute just outside
New Orleans. It's unclear how she ended up there, but it quickly becomes
apparent why she's being kept away from the public. Mona Lisa possesses
the ability to perform a sort of hypnosis on others, controlling their
limbs as though she were playing a Nintendo Wii. After displaying this
ability on the staff at the institute, she strolls out, still clad in a
straitjacket. Amirpour quickly introduces one of the classic '80s
clichés – the scene where the protagonist encounters a bunch of punks
and ends up stealing their clothes – but subverts it by having the punks
turn out to be a thoroughly decent lot who give Mona Lisa a pair of
shoes and point her in the direction of the city.
It's there that she is discovered by tough talking stripper Bonnie (Kate Hudson). Realising Mona Lisa's gift could make her a lot of money, she takes
her under her wing, using the girl's powers to con strip club customers
into handing over their wallets, along with those of unsuspecting ATM
users. On Mona Lisa's tail is a cop, Officer Harold (Craig Robinson), who fell victim to Mona Lisa's powers and shot himself in the leg.
With his colleagues assuming he was simply being clumsy, making him the
laughing stock of his precinct, he's determined to hunt down Mona Lisa.
Add in Bonnie's young son Charlie (Evan Whitten), who begins to
bond with Mona Lisa in a way he never quite did with his neglectful
mother.
The central premise of an innocent with superpowers being exploited for
criminal gain owes a lot to Kornel Mundruczo's Hungarian superhero riff
Jupiter's Moon. The relationship between the heavy metal loving Charlie and Mona Lisa
is straight out of
Terminator 2. There are moments that feel like they've been borrowed from countless
other films. Yet it's all done with such an affection that it plays like
a genuine creation of Amirpour rather than a cynical attempt to ride the
current wave of nostalgia for past decades. Another key influence would
seem to be the films of Sean Baker. Watching Bonnie and Mona Lisa move
through the New Orleans night hustling and bustling, it's hard not to
think of the characters of Baker's
Tangerine. A sleazy yet ultimately avuncular drug dealer played by
Ed Skrein could easily slot into one of Baker's explorations of
America's underclass.
But Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon has an energy of its
own. The soundtrack often feels misjudged, but it sounds like nothing
else, as though Amirpour was determined to include some needle drops
whether they fitted or not. The camera often moves in unexpected ways,
floating in one direction when it seems the opposite would have made
more logical sense, as though the camera is evoking Mona Lisa's sense of
trying to figure out her surrounds. The filmmaking is deceptively smart
and innovative despite the derivative nature of the narrative.
Amirpour's first two films felt like pretentious takes on genre
filmmaking, but there's nothing pretentious about
Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon. This is a filmmaker having fun – and nobody is having more fun than
Hudson with her Jennifer Lopez impersonation – yet ironically it feels
like Amirpour's most mature offering.
