Cinema
Mona Lisa (18', Odeon Haymarket)
London pride
Peter Ackroyd
This is a film about London, and in the first few moments we are presented with some of that city's principal landmarks among them the sturdy figure of Bob Hoskins, who is rapidly taking the place of Tommy Trinder as everyone's idea of a Londoner. He is bullet-headed, slightly plump and has that rolling gait — the nearest analogy would be that of a sailor trying to walk against a strong wind which suggests a wild infancy somewhere east of Tower Bridge. On this occasion he plays George, just out of prison and giving every sign of being about to go back in again. He is hired as a chauffeur for Simone, whom he describes quite correctly as 'a tall thin black tart', and as he drives her on her appointed rounds they strike up an uneasy friendship. Although this is a film which borrows the circular structure of a conventional 'thriller', it seems at first that together they will begin to understand a world in which they have been deposited like so much lost property.
In other words this film views London from that wonderful vantage point some- times known as 'the gutter'; this is a world of whores, strippers, ponces and punters where only the meanest can be expected to survive. But in fact, despite an occasional violent effect, the naturalism of Mona Lisa is really only skin deep: with a white rabbit being passed from hand to hand, a quirky artisan who makes plastic spaghetti, and a general tendency by everyone concerned to fabricate stories and surreal episodes, the real direction of this film is towards farce or fantasy. This is not a London culled from social documentaries; this city ' is crazed, melodramatic, a place of magic (black or white, according to taste), myste- rious and fundamentally unreal. It is a romantic city, therefore, and one of the film's themes is concerned with the search for a lost girl and an attendant threat to innocence which might have come out of De Quincey or Dickens. The director and co-writer of Mona Lisa, Neil Jordan, is not quite of their company, not yet at least, and there are times when his concentration upon prostitution becomes too sen- timental; but the affiliations are clear. In his previous film, The Company of Wolves, he explored the territories of fantasy; and now, here, he is bringing that particular vision to bear upon urban material.
This makes for some peculiar effects, as well as for some agreeable ones. Certainly it is a difficult tone to sustain for long, but one of the pleasures of Bob Hoskins's performance (for which he won the 'best actor award' at this year's Cannes Film Festival) lies in his ability to bridge the gap between the stolid realism of his cockney `type' and the more tentative manoeuvres of a hero out of romantic farce. It is not his fault that certain of the cheaper effects when, for example, he is forced to play the role of a bull in various china shops — have been allowed to stand. The film does not need them, since in a narrative as accom- plished as this the conventional comic clichés do not elicit any response.
But he is not alone on the screen for long, and is well supported here by Cathy Tyson as the prostitute Simone. There is a theory that the readers of fiction are really only interested in the passages of dialogue, and wade through narrative or description from a sense of painful duty. Certainly it is true that, in the cinema, a film can be held together by a strong central relationship which is the visual equivalent of dialogue. So it is that Hoskins and Tyson manage to dominate the screen, despite good per- formances from both Michael Caine and Robbie Coltrane; they are an updated version of Laurel and Hardy, with the extra frisson of unstated sexual passion to lend point to their otherwise only comic conversations.
It is rare for a novelist such as Neil Jordan to have so strong a visual sense (or, rather, it is not often that a novelist gets the chance to make his own films), but Mona Lisa provides clear evidence that he has been able successfully to combine a literary and a cinematic sensibility. This is not a film that bears the blight of Channel 4, with an unreconstructed social realism carrying the added penalty of a 'message'. This is a picture conceived on an ambitious scale. At the end its melodrama triumphs, and a certain self-indulgence seeps through the resulting cracks but, nevertheless, Mona Lisa shows every sign of being thought through, with all its disparate elements coming together to form a com- plete statement.
Previous page
