The title of Ana Lily Amirpour’s latest, the supernatural comedy Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, has a strong whiff of the werewolf tale about it and the film cannily riffs on this mythology along with employing the director’s customary visual flair and oddball genre playfulness. Amirpour’s previous features also featured a strong lone female character, impressing with vampire western A Girl Who Walks Home Alone at Night, but then faltering with the dystopian cannibal sci-fi The Bad Batch. Is Amirpour’s bag of tricks finally starting to wear thin? Earlier on, we see one of the characters open a fortune-cookie with a message that reads: ‘Forget what you know’ which is strangely apt for an urban fairy-tale that is outlandish but is only surface-level memorable.
In many ways, Mona Lisa can be seen as Amirpour’s version of the superhero genre, but we don’t get an origin story. The ambling hipster cool of Jim Jarmusch seems to be more of a touchstone here than ever before. In a gleefully b-movie set-up, the film begins with our super-heroine Mona (Burning‘s Jun Jong-Seo in her first English-language role) escaping from the ‘Home for Mentally Insane Adolescents’ where it is very quickly revealed in a comically pitched violent confrontation with an unpleasant female prison attendant that she is in possession of Carrie-like telekinetic powers. Mona is now set loose to roam the streets of New Orleans, and to begin with, there is a lot of comic mileage in this fish-out-of-water scenario.
Mona is given directions to follow the train tracks across the Bayou and like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, she encounters a cast of outsiders much like herself including low-level drug dealer Fuzz, which Ed Skein plays in lovely charming stoner fashion. Meanwhile Craig Robinson’s beleaguered and increasingly flustered cop Harold is hot on the heels of our telekinetic anti-heroine. The most significant relationship that Mona forms, however, is with an exotic dancer named Bonnie Blair (Kate Hudson) and her young son Charlie (Evan Whitten). Once Bonnie discovers Mona’s abilities, she begins to exploit this for financial gain by first targeting a group of gormless men at the strip club where she works and then swindling customers to part over their savings at cash machines. The role of Bonnie is a drastic change of pace for Hudson who has a lot of fun with her performance, decked out in high heels and crop tops, she is able to imbue a lot of heart and a redemptive arc into a character who has questionable motives and a less than attentive approach to motherhood. In fact, it is the disaffected and lonely Charlie, who likes to wear Suicidal Tendencies T-shirts and mosh angstily to heavy metal, that provides the emotional fulcrum of the film, especially in his endearingly sweet friendship with Mona. The end of the film has a genuine emotional surge which is missing from the rest of this empty genre exercise.
As in her debut film’s “Bad City,” Amirpour is especially good at surface textures and her vision of the Big Easy with its diners, convenience stores, strip joints and the iconic Bourbon Street is all shot with bold, neon-lit garishness. Music is also still a distinctive ingredient of her filmmaker DNA and musical composer and soundtrack director Daniele Luppo utilises everything from jackin’ house beats to thrashing rock to add to this gumbo of ideas, moods, and genres. That is the main issue with this film. It’s immensely watchable but it is ultimately a film with nothing to add beyond showcasing its director’s genre versatility. There are a few moments where the film touches upon a contemporary resonance about outsiderdom; at one point, we see Donald Trump’s face appear on a TV news bulletin and later we catch a glimpse at Mona’s case file which says she was seeking political asylum in the USA. A case of mistaken identity during the film’s airport set conclusion acts as a sharp stinging attack on racial profiling, but these moments are fleeting and few far between. Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon is a great title in the lack of a great movie but it is still a sporadically diverting one.
