Mona Lisa turns out to be the second movie set in Kings Cross that I’ve seen in as many Saturdays.
Like Breaking and Entering, it depicts London’s criminal underworld. Unlike that movie, it shows us almost nothing of any other part of London. George, a former taxi driver (I think) played by Bob Hoskins, has just been released from a seven-year prison sentence and finds his wife won’t talk to him. She won’t let him see his fifteen-year-old daughter either. George moves in with his friend Thomas (Robbie Coltrane)—a mechanic whose hobby is putting together strange, semi-artistic installations made of kitsch plastic spaghetti towers and glowing Madonnas. He needs a job. Since Thomas has preserved his vintage Jaguar for him, and since, in some obscure way, a small-time crime boss (Michael Caine) owes him for taking a fall, the latter gives him a job as a driver. In fact, his assignment is to act as a beard for Simone, a lovely black call girl (Kathy Tyson) who has a secret.
The cinematography is beautiful. The film opens in the fog as George crosses the Thames. He sits alone on a park bench for a while, then gets up and resumes his walk to the old neighborhood. Nat Cole’s “Mona Lisa” plays in the background. The lighting is reminiscent of classic British cinema and somehow also of those films that used to lovingly depict the tight-knit neighborhoods of New York’s outer boroughs.
True, Tyson’s hairdos were distractingly reminiscent of Rachel Ward’s in Blade Runner, and Ward herself had probably darker skin than Simone’s Arab client, Raschid. (Intriguingly, the end of the story could be interpreted—though with some violence—as having some similarities to that of Thelma and Louise, which like Blade Runner was directed by Jordan’s fellow Brit, Ridley Scott.) But these are minor points. Mona Lisa was released when independent film was just getting big. It has something of the nascent underworld vibe of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, and even Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, as George uncovers a world of kinky sex and degradation that he had never sunk quite low enough to suspect the existence of.
The sexual politics of the film, however, are what stand out twenty-three years later. George rescues Simone from her destructive way of life, but not in the traditional way he’d hoped. Hoping to win her gratitude and consequently her affection, he agrees to search the London sex clubs for her younger, drug-addicted friend. He rescues her and they all run off to Brighton. There, he discovers that the two women are in love with one another.
Shocked and disappointed, he accuses Simone of using him, but before long the bad guys intervene. Simone kills them both in a nearly hysterical rage (the life of a prostitute, in the end, has been too much for her), and stops just short of killing George. He returns to an honest mechanic’s life with Thomas and reacquaints himself with his daughter. The nonjudgmental treatment of homosexuality is very subtle, and very brave for its time.
Comments