Mona Lisa & The Blood Moon (Prime Video)
** 1/2
There are many flawed characters and many flaws in Ana Lily Amirpour’s Mona Lisa & The Blood Moon, so much that sometimes it gets hard to tell which came first: the damaged characters or the equally fractured storytelling.
Amirpour is best known for her directorial debut in that vibrant vampirical experience A Girl Walks Alone. Kookiness seems the keystone to her directorial vision. Mona Lisa & The Blood Moon starts with a young female inmate of a mental asylum Mona Lisa(Jeon Jong-seo) making her escape after wounding a nurse.
Thus begins Mona Lisa’s journey and by proxy, our journey into the wackiest and yet most heartwarming trip down the trippy lane since One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.While Jeon Jong-seo is in splendid feline shape as the disturbed yet clear-headed fugitive, it is clearly Kate Hudson who is the scenestealer as Bonnie , a fey stripper in a bar and a single mother who takes Mona Lisa in. It is a companionship of convenience for Bonnie. Since Mona Lisa has kinetic powers Bonnie uses Mona Lisa to make some quick bucks,
But it is not only about money. The bond of empathy between the two women is real and rousing with the two actresses pitching in believable fragmented performance as unfinished women looking to be more just a hole in the universe. Before we can really get into these two women’s heads, the relationship quickly moves from Bonnie to her smart and wise son Charlie(Eva Whitten) as Mona Lisa and the boy flee together to a Utopia that doesn’t exist.
While this film is decidedly not a heavyweight study of bonding among misfits it most certainly has a distinctive style and voice of narration, warm and wacky and tender with no patience for any kind of pretence or artifice.
The actors articulate the confusions of the characters in vigorous intelligent performances. While Hudson and Jung-seo anchor the dark yet festive mood , Ed Skrein as Fuzz, another misfit whom Mona Lisa runs into, brings a whole new meaning to the appearances-can-be-deceptive concept.
What really makes this film special are the characters. They are completely chaotic in their compulsions. But the director never fails to extract a bedrock of empathy from each of the characters. Mona Lisa & The Blood Moon may not be your Disney family outing. But it says so much about what family really means , especially when we see Bonnie beaten black and blue in a dark alley by a bunch of men who clearly tell her they don’t want to have sex with her. They only want to thrash her to a pulp.
It’s a cold heartless world out there where all of us are potential victims . We could do with some of the TLC that this film showers on its confused characters. They are all running away from the truth, not knowing where they are heading.
