Word: mona
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...Mona Lisa...
...lesson to be learned from Mona Lisa is that one brilliantly human and talented actor is almost, but not quite enough to make a brilliant movie. Bob Hoskins' performance (for which he understandably won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival) makes you laugh and cry and hope for him, although you expect a heartbreaking finale of tragic proportions from the beginning of the movie. But Hoskins' role as a stepped on underdog doesn't make room for his near-Shakespearean tragic potential, and you leave the theater feeling cheated...
...Mona Lisa, a lavishly praised new British film, proves you don't have to be in Hollywood to go Hollywood. It begins with a powerful perception: when a man looks at a woman, he sees the fiction he has created of her, and out of this visionary myopia, this need to fashion a Galatea or a Bride of Frankenstein, come love, lust, violence and art. Simone (Cathy Tyson), a chic London call girl, understands this impulse in men and knows how to indulge it to her profit. Well, it's a living. But to George (Bob Hoskins), assigned...
...Director Neil Jordan (who wrote the + script with David Leland) tells the story from George's point of view while filming it in a style as fancy and knowing as Simone's. No wonder audiences have taken to this gritty romance as to a mongrel puppy; for at heart Mona Lisa is an old-fashioned poor-soul weepie, and George is less a Cagney rakehell than a Chaplin tramp. Ever clever, though, Jordan massages the viewer's sentimentality like Simone servicing a dim, fond client...
...Mona Lisa...