Mona Lisa.

NOT SO JOCUND 

BEWARE OF the film that features a symbolic white horse! Even if it is the work of as fine a director as Andrzej Wajda (Lotna) or Ivan Passer (A Boring Afternoon), that snowy steed inevitably spells trouble: Something pretentious is afoot, or ahoof. There is a white horse--tethered, no less--in Mona Lisa, too; and, sure enough, this third picture by Neil Jordan, the Irish novelist and cineast, is no exception to the rule.

This is the story of George, a petty criminal who took a seven-year prison rap for his chief, Mortwell, now a big boss in the prostitution and pornography rackets, with a little blackmail, it seems, on the side. George is rewarded with the soft job of acting as chauffeur and cover for Simone, a high-toned and high-priced black callgirl who, like George, works for Mortwell. It is also the story of Simone, who is desperately searching for a close friend from her streetwalker days, Cathy, a 15-year-old hooker hooked on heroin, from whom she has become separated, and whom she asks George to track down for her.

George's wife no longer allows her ex-convict husband to see his beloved daughter, Jeannie, also 15, to whom George now gives rides home from school on the sly in his spiffy Jaguar. His only other friend is Thomas, a fat, jovial, would-be writer of thrillers, who lives in a trailer inside a warehouse, and seems to be an auto mechanic and peddler of stolen goods (this is all very hazy) such as plastic mounds of spaghetti for restaurant display and light-up statuettes of Jesus and Mary. George, at first wary of, even hostile toward, Simone, gradually falls deeply in love with her, her chaste kiss on the top of his head acting as catalyst. The tall Simone, who at first despises this uncouth little man--squat, balding, plebeian, irascible, baby-bulldoggish--learns to respect him for his kindness, courage, and loyalty, and proceeds to buy him nice clothes, teach him manners, and turn him into the gentleman he always was at heart. But she doesn't reciprocate his love.

Neil Jordan--whose previous Company of Wolves, a revisionist fantasy on the Little Red Riding Hood theme, I missed--makes explicit reference here to the story of the Frog Prince redeemed by the maiden's kiss, but gives us another unorthodox recension of a fairy tale. Thus the obverse of Simone's kiss is the kiss George gives Jeannie, who asks him for one of those tricks "dads are meant to do," and them comments, "That's a good trick." The film marks the progress of George from seeming brute to "Mr. George," as Simone dubs him when, convinced of his decency, she asks him to find Cathy; and thence to "Father George," as Cathy, whom he finally locates in a church, jeeringly addresses him. And he has indeed become a shepherd, or would-be shepherd, to several prostitutes, whence he rises further, upon rescuing Cathy from the dragon's lair (in a scene that for sheer improbability would be hard to match) and reuniting her with Simone, into Saint George, as he confronts that unlikely white horse tethered behind a roadside eatery.

And friend Thomas?? He is nothing less than Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor. Early on, George informs him that "angels are men," not women; and, indeed, George and Thomas are the only active doers of good here. Thomas always asks for "the whole story," the summa, as it were, and it is he who produces those electrically lit holy statuettes, or bings the light of Aristotelian reason into Christian faith. He is, like Saint Thomas, a man of various skills and knowledge, his Italianness suggested by the plastic spaghetti, as well as by real ones he feeds to George. And there is also a reproduction of the Mona Lisa on his refrigerator, which connects the greatest medieval mind, Thomas's, with the supreme Renaissance one, Leonardo's. The eponymous Mona Lisa, of course, is the aloof Simone, whom George describes as a tart but a lady, and, beyond that, feminine nature itself, underscored by Nat King Cole on the soundtrack at the start and finish of the film, as he sings, "Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa? Or just a cold and lonely lovely work of art?"

The mostly but not exclusively fairy-tale symbolism lurks in almost every aspect of the film. Thus the villain's name is Mortwell, dispenser of death; his chief henchman, a sadistic black pimp, is called Anderson, with indubitable (though obscure) overtones of Hans Christian. Dwarfs appear both in the dialogue and in one actual sequence of this screenplay by Neil Jordan and David Leland; in a scene of drastic revelation, Simone and George wear, respectively, heart-shaped and star-shaped sunglasses that comment ironically on the situation; during a deadly chase along Brighton Pier, the pursued George and Simone knock over some large advertising-display hearts; after her last, deadly act, Simone lifts her face to heaven and is illuminated by the kind of oblique beam that descends on saints in baroque paintings; and so on, with various sorts of symbolism on the rampage.

There is, it seems to me, a very serious dissociation of sensibility at work here. "The Mona Lisa, a disturbing work of art, has a kind of sorcery about it that provokes disturbances," Mary McCarthy writes; a work of high art, we might add, which is what Neil Jordan's film aspires to, with its religious and fairy-tale symbolism. But the sordidness of the story, its improbability the only high thing about it, is in direct, jarring clash with its high-flown aspirations, each getting in the other's way. A callgirl as Mona Lisa, a petty crook who may or may not have killed someone (the film fudges a number of crucial matters) as Saint George, a dealer in stolen goods as Aquinas--these and their likes do not elevate the meanness into anything but pretension, while merely trivializing or demeaning what is exalted.

Nevertheless, Mona Lisa does have its assets. In the exploration of the worlds of sexual degradation--by having his production designer (Jamie Leonard) and cinematographer (Roger Pratt) create a livid-lurid environment of exotic aquarium colors for lower-class vice, while reserving an elegantly cool palette for the Ritz Hotels and ritzy fashions and furnishings (costumes by the aptly named Louise Frogley) of upper-class perversion--Jordan comes up with some memorable images without much explicit detail, the horror made ineffable by being merely suggested. By his evocations of three 15-year-olds, the sweet but not saccharine Jeannie (Zoe Nathenson), and the two pathetic but quite different child prostitutes--May (Sammi Davies), wearing her crucifix earring and yearning for ice cream while she walks her beat, and Cathy (Kate Hardie), heroin-ravaged and with a system that can no longer digest anything but ice cream--Jordan tells us, through partial contrasts and lopsided parallels, something about the paradoxes and ironies of life, not least the curious emotional dependence of whores on the pimps they hate. And the dialogue is generally tart, and not infrequently imaginative.

The central relationship between George and Simone, astutely observed with almost clinical astringency, is nonetheless also poignant and even poetic in its tender and violent hopelessness. But even here, there are flaws: How did an ex-streetwalker and present callgirl of about twenty acquire so much taste and such an upper-class accent? How can George, with his background, be so naive about certain aspects of sex and drug addiction? And if Jordan avoids the Scylla of the whore with the heart of gold, is the Charybdis of the ex-con with the soul of a saint that much better? On the other hand, in Mortwell, in whom suavity and sleaziness have been raised to the ultimate degree of charming monstrosity, Jordan, with the help of a fiendishly persuasive performance by Michael Caine, has created an utterly fantastic and totally believable demon. Too bad that, on top of that white horse, there has to be a white rabbit in the film, preposterously present at the unlikeliest moment.

And besides some deft direction and dialogue and consistently fine camera work, there is the acting. George is played by Bob Hoskins, one of the most fascinating actors in today's cinema. The scarcely contained excess of excitability for good or ill, the aura of bewilderment under the surface security, and the sweet, sweaty, acrid sense of life being lived intensely every instant that Hoskins brings to everything he does here is, to use an overworked word judiciously, mesmerizing. Very good, too, is Cathy Tyson as Simone, devious and angry but also wise and touching, with an aura that combines the provocation of kinky sexuality with something still questing, still unspoiled. Everyone else is right too, notably Robbie Coltrane as Thomas, as well as all those girls and their exploiters and customers.

The mode of Mona Lisa is gutter Dostoyevsky, with the former, alas outpulling the latter. But if I have devoted so much space to the film, it is because it is one of the painfully few movies these days whose appeal is to an adult audience; and because, though only intermittently warm and very seldom real, it at least strives to be a work of art.