Nathaniel reporting from the Venice Film Festival
Let’s take a wee break from the Oscar-bound and foreign arthouse offerings at Venice and talk genre. As with comedies, there’s not enough of it at festivals but it’s good to program a variety of pictures if you can. Here are two films featuring supernatural elements, one a complete misfire the other a future cult gem...
Last Night in Soho (Edgar Wright)
I am deeply sad to report that this wasn’t (at all) for me, though I was so looking forward as I generally enjoy Wright’s work. I was worried from the start with the movie’s hyper enthusiasm about everything it’s doing even before it’s begun doing things...
The opening sequence is right out of Adventures in Babysitting with our protagonist, Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) who is leaving to study fashion in London, lip-synching cutesily around her bedroom to an old fashioned song. Her grandmother is worried — in a clumsy heavy foreshadowing kind of way — that the big city will set off mental illness in our heroine just as it did for her dead mother!
Unfortunately once our heroine is in London, the picture becomes increasingly ridiculous It peaks extremely early when Louise falls asleep and into a dream set in the 1960s in which she is Sandy (dazzling as ever Anya Taylor-Joy) an ultra confident beauty with big dreams who immediately catches the eye of a talent manager (shady as ever Matt Smith). This first dream sequences is a dizzying whirl of visual effects craftmanship in which we’re continually seeing mirror images that aren’t actually mirrors with Thomasin appearing onscreen with Anya whenever reflective surfaces are near and sometimes even when they’re not courtesy of the frantic cutting. That's especially true in a dance sequence in which Matt Smith whirls the girl around and sometimes it’s Anya and sometimes Thomasin. It would be churlish to say that this first setpiece is not a “wow" -- especially a crazy how'd they do that? staircase descent -- but it’s cut short with a blaring alarm clock. Eloise wakes up. I’ve rarely hated an alarm clock in a movie more but Venice screening rooms have deafening volume!.
Come to think of it that’s an apt metaphor for the movie itself. Every time it gets interesting, it kills its own buzz by doing too much or not doing it well. There’s one more peak in which Anya Taylor Joy mesmerizes while singing “Downton” accapella for a club owner but its downhill from there -- not just downhill but off the cliff.
It’s difficult to narrow down what’s wrong with the picture (there's so much!) but let's start with who is it for? It’s too adult for children with scenes of prostitution and slasher violence but the characters are as paper thin as toddler friendly cartoons. Most shockingly, given the director, it has no real sense of humor. Thomasin McKenzie, whose mousesqueak voice can be fragile magic in certain roles, is lost with no character whatsoever to play. Eloise is no more than a visual effect for the film’s best scenes and then she’s tasked with hysterics in virtually every other. Her love interest subplot is so unconvincing and chermistry free that I actually felt physically bad for the actor and actress. And the milieu doesn't read well either; blatant cash grab Cruella, of all things, feels more realistic as a fashion-student movie! Last Night in Soho's plot has the very strange distinction of being both depressingly literal and completely nonsensical at the same time. And for those looking for horror, the scares are beyond cheesy. It clearly wants to be feminist but the weird messaging around sexwork and sexuality in general makes that deeply uncomfortable, too. This movie is a Marnie but not yet diagnosed. D
Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon (Ana Lily Armipour)
A much better option when you’re in the mood for an absurd and ridiculous genre story with horror elements, is the latest from Ana Lily Armipour. While the Iranian-American director has yet to top her incredible debut, the black and white Persian language vampire flick A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, she’s also yet to make a dull or unmemorable movie. I hated her second feature, The Bad Batch, but “dull” it wasn’t. Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon is more deeply strange than either of her two previous pictures, swerving from lurid horror to sweet friendship drama, to feminist stripper picture (absent the anti-sex vibe of Last Night in Soho), to crime spree comedy as if following its every chaotic whim or the eery pull of that full moon we keep seeing in the sky. It appears to have no real plan or end point in mind and in this regard it is very much like its supernaturally powered lead Mona Lisa Lee (well played by Burning’s Jong-Seo Jeon) who has been catatonic in a mental institution for over a decade before escaping into the real world (location: New Orleans) or as real as the world is when viewed through a cult movie lens. Not all of it works but it’s super watchable and bound to collect ardent fans. You can tell that Kate Hudson as a self-serving stripper, Ed Skrein as a drug dealer named “Fuzz” and Craig Robinson as a limping cop in pursuit are all having a ton of fun with their roles. B