Bob Hoskins is a low level gangster who helps a snooty, mysterious call girl in 1986's Mona Lisa. This one's a fairy tale in which prostitutes are all gold-hearted damsels waiting for rescue and gangsters are either villains or heroes waiting to happen. It's not a bad movie and it has some truly interesting ideas at play but expect the insights to be about truth versus appearance and the compelling nature of mystery rather than a hard look at London's criminal underworld.
Hoskins plays George, a thug who's just done seven years in prison for his gangster boss (Michael Caine). We meet George showing up at the door of his estranged wife and teenage daughter. The wife immediately starts screaming and shoving him out the door and we eventually learn that she has basically erased the man from existence within the household. In a movie about appearance versus true nature, George himself is already a man of multiple roles in varied contexts.
For reasons that are never explained, George buys a rabbit for his boss. Maybe Hoskins really had a thing for rabbits (this was two years before Who Framed Roger Rabbit). Presumably it's a code of some kind among London gangs. The film continually poses visual or conceptual puzzles with solutions that may or may not be presented later in the film. George goes to stay with his friend (Robbie Coltrane), a mechanic who has a variety of odd side businesses, which results in George walking into the garage to behold tables covered with plastic spaghetti, each serving having its own hovering fork above it dug into a mound of noodles. Coltrane's character explains "the Japanese have cornered the market" on plastic food, which may well be true because I do see plastic food in the windows of nearly all restaurants here in Japan.
Eventually, George is given a job as a driver for Simone (Cathy Tyson), the call girl, who's immediately angry at George's blue collar appearance and attitude. Her business is providing a fantasy for men at expensive hotels and mansions and George's appearance and mannerisms kind of burst that bubble. George is shown to be very slow on the uptake, so much so it strains credibility. Simone wants him to buy nicer clothes so she gives him a wad of bills. He goes out and buys a Hawaiian shirt and tan leather jacket which actually do look pretty chic but aren't what Simone had in mind and she angrily tells him so. The next day, she takes him to a men's clothing store and he can't figure out what they're doing there. He even asks if she likes to wear men's clothes and she finally has to spell it out for him that she's shopping for him. This happens a few times in the film--we in the audience figure things out a lot quicker than George does. I'm not sure how much that was intentional.
The song, "Mona Lisa", plays over the opening credits but the title also seems to refer to the famously mysterious quality of the painting itself. Simone, like the other various visual puzzles throughout the film, is herself a puzzle whose apparent nature changes throughout the movie.
Mona Lisa is available on The Criterion Channel.
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