'Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon' is a Sweet, Scuzzy Blast [Venice Review]

Like finding a grubby, balled-up bill in your spangly g-string and uncrumpling it to discover doughy old Ben Franklin staring benignly back at you, Ana Lily Amirpour‘s third feature is a sweet, scuzzy surprise made all the sweeter/scuzzier because you don’t know quite what you did to deserve it. Certainly, at the Venice Film Festival –where “Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon” snuck into competition – giggling into one’s mask at its garish but gladhearted genre excesses felt like getting away with something naughty. At one point, Craig Robinson‘s befuddled cop, trying to understand how he came to have a bullet in his knee after a mysterious encounter with the eponymous Mona, is told by a probably-charlatan New Orleans fortune teller: “You don’t pick voodoo, son. Voodoo pick you.” And this time, after following up her striking debut, “A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night,” with the derailed ambitions of the disappointingly half-baked “The Bad Batch,” movie voodoo definitely picked Amirpour, who delivers a film born howling – and winking – under a big, red Louisiana full moon. “Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon” is a blast.

As a slice of pure popcorn escapism, the film begins, appropriately, with an escape. In a padded cell in a mental institution out beyond the swampy, frog-loud bayou, a young Korean inmate who has been in a drooling vegetative state for a decade suddenly stirs. This is Mona Lisa Lee, played by Jun Jong Seo in a role far less delicate than that of the tangerine-peeling, disappearing girl in Lee Chang-dong‘s 2018 masterpiece “Burning,” but somehow also fueled by her peculiar, enigmatic watchability. Mona hasn’t just regained awareness, she’s awoken with an inexplicable superpower that enables her to take over someone else’s motor functions, and to get them to physically do whatever she wants, even as their terrified minds remain their own.

Her first exercise of this ability is in getting the casually cruel, gum-snapping female orderly who’s been sent in to trim her toenails to stab herself repeatedly in the thigh with her clippers, then to undo the ties on Mona’s straitjacket. It would be vicious, were the woman not so evidently due a little retribution: at times, Amirpour’s screenplay is almost too schematic in ensuring that Mona only hurts or humiliates those who deserve it, but then again, this is a film that is obscurely driven by a deep, almost fairytale faith in the perfect yin-yang of that bitch, karma. And Mona – karma’s handmaiden – isn’t just a stumbling naif reborn, near-mute and blinking, into a bad, dangerous, nighttime world, but a litmus test for other people’s instincts to either protect or exploit, and a dispenser of judgment on and justice for the choices they make.

Out in the wide world, barefoot under a full moon that is already making people a little crazy, Mona encounters helpers and hinderers among the denizens of New Orleans’ seedy outskirts. Her most unexpected ally comes in the form of Fuzz (a terrific, unrecognizably Vanilla-Iced-up Ed Skrein), a lowlife dealer and DJ whose muscle car’s zebra-print interior is lit by gaudy disco lights, and who seems moved to a gallantry even he doesn’t understand by Mona’s forlorn appearance in his life. He buys her junk food and soda in a film in which no one eats anything but; all that’s on the menu is burgers, fries, and a brand of corn snack called Cheese Puffos that are clearly of no nutritional content whatsoever and are covered in synthetic flavoring dust the exact color of Donald Trump.

Just when Fuzz is putting the moves on Mona, Officer Harold (Robinson) shows up and recognizes her from the APB picture, and Mona is on the run again. This time she meets Bonnie, a stripper, and self-confessed bad mother, played to such sleazy perfection by Kate Hudson that you could swear she made her name playing cynical, manipulative, trash-talking pole dancers in mesh tops who get into catfights in diner parking lots, though I can’t recall that ever happening in “You, Me and Dupree.” Bonnie quickly assesses Mona’s powers and befriends her, letting her stay with her and her neglected, self-sufficient little boy Charlie (an endearing Evan Whitten), a pure little lonely soul in a Suicidal Tendencies T-shirt with whom Mona bonds over heavy metal. It’s Charlie who warns Mona about his mother: “She’s good at making people like her, at first,” he says disconsolately, aware long before the unworldly, otherworldly Mona is that Bonnie is mostly just using her – even if her narrow horizons mean her biggest ambition for her new friend’s superpower is to roll her strip club’s patrons and commit petty ATM theft.

The seedy energy of the nighttime streets, alleys, and strip clubs of New Orleans’ French Quarter infect the images with a restlessness that’s delivered rich and funky by Ari Aster‘s regular cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski. The camera is always nudging the story forward, onward, when it’s not spinning away from Mona, as though it’s a little afraid of her itself. But if the neon-slick images, the determinedly cheap and tacky costuming, and the pummeling soundtrack, filled with glow-stick house music and hard rock cuts, suggest that “Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon” is nothing but disposable trash itself, well, it sort of is. At the same time, the deceptive cutting rhythm of Taylor Levy‘s editing finds within the film’s forward momentum plenty of opportunities to let a glance linger, or a performance beat breathe. And Amirpour’s script has a sentimental heart that sometimes thumps louder even than Fuzz’s pulsing house music, offering a strangely soulful and romantic outlook on this violent and venal demimonde.

“Do you like people?” Mona asks Harold during one of their showdowns. People, she is learning, are “not so easy to like.” While that’s certainly true of the motley collection of misfits, losers, and scumbags that populate Amirpour’s film, one of its saving graces lies in the fact that Amirpour herself clearly likes her characters a great deal and contrives ways for her comic-book-ish story to forgive their very evident flaws just as much as it condemns them. That makes “Mona Lisa and Blood Moon” – and I mean this as a compliment here for some reason – not just a fun, flashy standalone movie but a potential template for a future film in which Mona could be dropped into another new milieu and, one by one, change the lives of and the relationships between everyone she meets. When Fuzz, in lieu of a farewell, says to Mona, who will soon get on a plane to Detroit, “See you in the sequel!”, it’s a little wink that for once does not instill dread at the idea. “Mona Lisa and the Motor City,” anyone? [B+]

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