Mona Lisa · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man sits in a parked car at night, watching a lit hotel doorway. There is a white rabbit on the seat beside him. He is waiting for a woman he is paid to drive and has begun, helplessly, to love.

George spends most of Mona Lisa behind glass. Roger Pratt keeps the camera inside the car with him or just outside it, so the city — Soho neon, the wet sodium shine of King's Cross — arrives as something seen through a windscreen, framed and held at a distance. The film's own premise hands us a Deleuzian situation before any theory is wheeled in: a tough guy whose image is out of date. George comes out of prison carrying an old sensory-motor kit — intimidation, loyalty, the hard man's code — that no longer fits any slot the world offers him. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image: the point where a character can no longer react adequately to what he perceives, where the wire between seeing and doing goes slack. George keeps trying to behave like the hero of an earlier crime picture. The world has quietly become a thing he can only watch.

So: the car. The camera tucked beside George, perceiving a man who is himself perceiving, is what Deleuze (after Peirce) calls a dicisign — we feel the lens present in the seat with him. The vehicle is his condition turned into geometry. He is mobile but sealed off, ferried through strata he belongs to neither, too coarse for Simone's hotel clientele and too sentimental for the predators he's sent among. Deleuze has a name for the figure who takes over when the agent stalls: the voyant, the seer, one who endures and watches because action has stopped paying out.

Then there is her face. The title is both a promise and a trap. Nat King Cole's recording plays George's idealization back to him — a smile he reads as warmth, a beauty he takes for hidden depth. Cathy Tyson gives Simone a cool, guarded, reflecting surface, a face that returns whatever is projected onto it and explains nothing. This is the affection-image distilled to what Deleuze calls a qualisign: an immobile face presenting one enigmatic quality — unreadability itself — lifted free of any action that would account for it. George stares and fills it with a story.

Here is Jordan's real invention. Classic noir kept the lie in the woman. The femme fatale deceives; the smitten man is her dupe. Out of the Past, which Mona Lisa plainly descends from, runs on her treachery. Jordan moves the falseness. Simone withholds, but she barely lies; the fiction is George's own. He is the one composing a false image and living inside it. Deleuze's powers of the false names precisely this — truth and falsity made undecidable not as a plot trick but as the film's actual subject. The unreliability here isn't a voice-over that fools us. It's a way of seeing. We learn the underworld at George's pace, through his misreading, so that when Simone's real life surfaces it lands as betrayal, though she broke no contract he hadn't invented. Vertigo taught this obsessive misrecognition; Jordan and his editor Lesley Walker, withholding the shape of Simone's world until George is in too deep, rebuild it for a man who thinks he's a knight.

Structurally the film runs as small-form detection. George is set to find a missing girl, Cathy, and each thing he does pries open a little more of a situation he cannot see whole. Deleuze's index of lack: a gesture that points to an unseen world behind it. The search is the lever; the King's Cross trade in held and underage girls is what the lever exposes. We read the city alongside George as a field of clues — the relation-image, meaning assembled from signs, the detective's reflex of treating every object as a mark that implies more than it shows.

What does the lens open up? It explains why a thriller plays as heartbreak. The machinery — Mortwell, the search, the eventual gun — is movement-image plumbing, and it works. But the gravity of the film sits with a man stranded at the hinge, a would-be agent reduced to a watcher, whose one decisive power turns out to be the power to be wrong about a face. Hoskins plays the entire arc inside that gap between seeing and doing: bantam aggression that finds nothing to land on, tenderness with no rightful object.

The lineage is craft, not homage. From The Big Sleep and Klute, the hired man drawn through a corrupt city by a woman whose agenda is withheld. From Taxi Driver, the deluded rescuer narrating his own myth until it detonates. From Get Carter, British gangland shot on real pavement, class and sex trade in documentary light, so Jordan's fairy-tale streak — the white rabbit, the kitsch romance of the title — has grime to push against. What he seeds forward is a humane neo-noir built on the protagonist's projection rather than the woman's guilt, the genre's falseness relocated into the eye of the man who loves.

Watch it again for the windscreen. Almost everything George wants sits on the far side of glass — lit, legible, and completely misread.