Mona Lisa · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Mona Lisa operates within film noir's shadow economy but turns that genre's machinery against itself: Roger Pratt's cinematography — nocturnal blues pooled in wet asphalt, the sickly amber of a Soho streetlamp, neon bleeding across hotel glass — creates the requisite atmosphere while grounding it so firmly in Thatcher-era London that the iconography feels earned rather than borrowed. The seamy transit zones George moves through — King's Cross pavements, motorway service stations, gilded hotel lobbies — function as any-space-whatever, disconnected zones that belong to no social world entirely, interstices where the criminal economy and the luxury economy covertly meet, and where a man like George is always out of place. But the film's deepest concern is the gaze. Pratt's camera habitually clings to Hoskins's blocky frame, filtering the city through George's idealizing consciousness so that we too mistake Simone for the virtuous, imperiled woman he needs her to be; the film borrows this POV-bound romantic misrecognition directly from Vertigo, whose Scottie Ferguson also reads a woman as the projection of his own desire. Where Hitchcock sustains the illusion until its catastrophic collapse, Jordan and editor Lesley Walker slow-burn the revelation across the investigation's entire length, so that the audience's disenchantment arrives in exact tempo with George's — making us implicated in the gaze we are simultaneously being taught to distrust.