Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon

Jeon Jong-seo and Kate Hudson

Ana Lily Amirpour's Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon barely got a theatrical release last year, but I was pleasantly surprised by it and found that it confirms Ms. Amirpour's visual gifts. We meet Mona, played by Burning's Jeon Jong-seo, under restraint in an asylum. However, Mona has the ability to hypnotize and physically manipulate people like marionettes, so her stay in the asylum is brief. The film is set in New Orleans and chronicles Mona's aimless and picaresque wanderings through the Crescent City where she mingles with the seedier elements of the underclass. 

Chief among those is a jaded and aging stripper named Bonnie Belle, played by a game Kate Hudson. Bonnie becomes hip to Mona's special skills and utilizes them so that soon she and her eleven year old son are rolling in the Benjamins. Mona's escape from the asylum and her subsequent criminal career draw the attention of the police, embodied by the always dependable Craig Robinson. To avoid a return trip to the asylum, Mona must flee New Orleans and is able to do so with the help of an unlikely white knight, a drug dealer/DJ named Fuzzy.

As one can perhaps tell from my thumbnail sketch of the plot, Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon suffers from a diffuse narrative and uncertain jumble of genres. As with Amirpour's previous film, The Bad Batch, the film's mise en scene far outstrips its script. However, the film's theme, similar to that of Amirpour's debut A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, is suited to its fantastical and horrific bent. Mona is an outsider who can never be fully integrated into the community. A theme equally suited to stories about supernatural monsters or emigres.

The picture triumphs in its portrait of the lurid demimonde of New Orleans. The lysergic, Day-Glo colors of the film are a perfect fit for the seamy underbelly that Amirpour portrays lurking around the edges of what a tourist sees in New Orleans. The bric-a-brac in a stripper's dressing room or Fuzzy's opulent car or a burgeoning adolescent's room tells us more about the characters than the often stilted dialogue. Daniele Luppi's electronic score helps to give the film the quality of a dimly perceived nightmare.

Jeon Jong-seo's halting English actually helps to bring out the alienated nature of her character. Kate Hudson's New Jersey accent is a jarring mistake, but I admired her gumption in the role. Best of all is Ed Skrein's Fuzzy, a marvelous mixture of menace and naivete.