A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, August 22, 2018

Mona Lisa (Neil Jordan, 1986)

Bob Hoskins in Mona Lisa
George: Bob Hoskins
Simone: Cathy Tyson
Mortwell: Michael Caine
Thomas: Robbie Coltrane
Anderson: Clarke Peters
Cathy: Kate Hardie
Jeannie: Zoë Nathenson
May: Sammi Davis

Director: Neil Jordan
Screenplay: Neil Jordan, David Leland
Cinematography: Roger Pratt
Production design: Jamie Leonard
Film editing: Lesley Walker
Music: Michael Kamen

If prostitution didn't exist, the movies would have had to invent it. What profession, other than doctors and lawyers, has generated more film footage? Mona Lisa is one of the worthier films about the life of a sex worker, never sinking into prurience or glossiness, even though occasionally it did bring to mind one of the worst movies in the genre, Garry Marshall's Pretty Woman (1990), in which an LA streetwalker undergoes an Eliza Doolittle transformation from tawdry to chic in the hands of a high-class john. Here, writer-director Neil Jordan reverses the process: It's the glamorous high-class London call girl Simone who turns schlubby George, her mob-appointed chauffeur, into a fashion plate, making him a better man and unintentionally causing him to fall in love with her. We're in the realm of romantic fantasy in both films, but Mona Lisa at least creates a plausibly cruel and dangerous milieu for its story, and Simone's fate after murdering the mob boss and her former pimp is ambiguous at best. Mona Lisa is distinguished by its cast, especially a star-making performance by Bob Hoskins, who won as best actor at Cannes and was nominated for an Oscar. But it's Jordan's screenplay, co-written with David Leland, that gives the cast so many interesting things to say and do, especially Robbie Coltrane as George's quirky chum and Michael Caine as the sinister Mortwell.
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