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United Kingdom · 1986
Rated R · 1h 45m
Director Neil Jordan
Starring Bob Hoskins, Cathy Tyson, Michael Caine, Robbie Coltrane
Genre Crime, Drama, Romance
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George is a recently released prisoner in London who finds himself working as a chauffer for Simone, a high-class call girl. When Simone enlists George in helping her find an old friend from her past, the two embark on a dangerous and exploratory journey through the city’s underworld.
Ultimately, there is something trite at the centre of the movie, most especially in the overuse of Nat King Cole’s haunting Mona Lisa to suggest Tyson’s ambiguity and Hoskins’s puzzlement. But this is almost concealed by Tyson’s sense of desperation and Hoskins’s painful sincerity.
Director Neil Jordan (Danny Boy, The Company of Wolves) does a good job of re-creating the dark romanticism of American film noir, and if the project does feel a little like a hand-me-down, it is graced by Jordan's fine, contemporary feel for bright, artificial colors and creatively mangled space.
The world Jordan envisions is desperate, but Hoskins’s human heart offers a lovely thread of hope.
ReelViews by James Berardinelli
In an era when movies about love almost always invariably devolve into formulaic affairs, Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa stands out as an often-surprising, multi-layered achievement. By offering a rumination on a wide variety of love - real, imagined, romantic, sexual, and platonic - Mona Lisa defies easy categorization and offers a complex and superior one-hundred minutes for all who view it.
Shines out as a rough diamond, a masterpiece of British cinema undeniably worthy of its classical title.
His vision is most immediately reminiscent of from the hellish New York of Scorsese's Taxi Driver, but Hoskins provides the crucial difference, spiking the nihilism by emerging from the abyss with a glimmer of hope instead of a thousand-yard stare.
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
The movie's ending is a little too neat for my taste. But in a movie like this, everything depends on atmosphere and character, and "Mona Lisa" knows exactly what it is doing.
The New York Times by Vincent Canby
NEIL JORDAN'S Mona Lisa is classy kitsch. It's as smooth and distinctive (and, ultimately, as insubstantial) as the old Nat (King) Cole recording of the song, which gives the film its title and a lot of its mood. It's also got high style, so you needn't hate yourself for liking it.
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