If there’s any value in writing what you know, as the old advice goes, it’s evidently a value not known by Ana Lily Amirpour. To date, the British-born Iranian-American filmmaker has helmed several short films and three features, Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon the third of those, and seemingly not one of them has even sought to reflect a reality anyone knows, never mind Amirpour herself. From vampires haunting the shadowy alleys of Tehran, to cannibal gangs in dystopian deserts, now to supernatural Korean fugitives grifting their way through the streets of New Orleans, Amirpour has instead sought to reflect her own burgeoning imagination and to startling effect.
As such, it’s perhaps best to approach Mona Lisa with an appreciation of its innate limitations – this is not a world we’re going to recognize but rather a world entirely of its creator’s making, its boundaries set where they set them, its rules bending to their will. Amirpour isn’t interested even in internal logic ― things happen in her movies just to happen, style exists for style’s sake alone and there’s rarely, if ever, any point to any of it. It’s audacious, to be sure, not least because it ensures that her movies will really only work at all for those for whom they work entirely. The rest of us? We’ll just have to be content with whatever point we can discern for ourselves.
And that’s much the case with Mona Lisa, a frankly pointless exercise in Amirpour’s incessant experimentation, with wildly varying results. She’s drawn comparisons to Tarantino in the past; as facile as it may be, comparing this particular filmmaker to others feels right, since her work bears such a heavy, deliberate debt to her cinematic inspirations. Here, there are clear strokes of David Lynch and, especially, Gregg Araki in her portrait of a crude, crass, American urban underbelly populated by outcasts and underdogs. But with every new stylistic flourish, there’s equal potential for failure as for success, and the mismatch whiplash between her myriad ideas is only amplified by the fact that every detail is overdone and over-emphasized. It’s outrageous, cacophonous, assaultive and exhausting.
Yet there’s always something to see and/or hear, almost to the point that one wonders if Amirpour were to scale back her stylizations more of them might have the space to make a meaningful impact. Her plot is almost picaresque, with the titular Mona (Jeon Jong-Seo), an escapee from a cartoonishly unpleasant asylum on the outskirts of New Orleans, falling in with stripper Bonnie (Kate Hudson), using her supernatural powers to grift strangers out of cash, and developing a bond with Bonnie’s son Charlie (Evan Whitten), all while being pursued by a curious cop (Craig Robinson) who she made shoot himself in the knee. It’s bizarre nonsense, both born out of Amirpour’s crazed creative fantasies and serving as a vehicle to foster yet more of the same. And so Mona Lisa strides boldly from one moment of wild artistic abandon to the next, complete with comical sound effects, insistent dark synthwave needle drops and all manner of wacky supporting players.
There’s a sense throughout that Amirpour is quasi-appropriating her milieu, exploiting the idiosyncrasies of her Louisiana setting and the distinct character of its inhabitants for hollow artistic gain. It’s a sense that isn’t quelled even by the stronger work put in by the director, cast and crew, since it’s bolstered by the weaker work that director seemingly can’t help but indulge in. She strains for unearned pathos, struggles with writing dialogue and consistently appears more invested in creating something cool than creating something substantial; cool is, after all, impossible to engender with intent ― it’s a byproduct of authenticity and originality, attributes which Amirpour’s work lacks most sorely.
That becomes less enervating as Mona Lisa progresses, however, as one becomes accustomed to all the oddity and starts to appreciate the quality of some of its elements. Hudson and, as drug dealer Fuzz, Ed Skrein make the most of their ridiculous roles, entirely in on the joke Amirpour is determined to make of them and wielding that awareness to turn in impressive, entertaining performances. It also looks fabulous, with every frame boasting some detail or another to warrant one’s interest. For all that it never really finds anywhere to go with its premise, Mona Lisa also never really drags and that may be due, if only in part, to the sheer amount of material Amirpour pours into every shot and every scene.
But it’s all worth so little, since style for style’s sake is only a success if the style is a success. In Mona Lisa, it’s only a success some of the time. Amirpour drew bountiful praise for effectively crafting a movie entirely out of style with 2014’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night; she’s pulling the same trick with each subsequent film too now. There’s value in her kind of experimentation ― goodness knows modern American cinema could do with more of it ― but maybe she could marry it to the value of writing what she actually knows and make a movie that’s genuinely worth the sum of all its stylistic parts.
Photo courtesy of Saban Films
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