Electric Theatre: Mona Lisa (1986)

Sarah Cleary on Neil Jordan's classic slice of 80s London noir

Bob Hoskins and Cathy Tyson in Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa.

Electric Theatre is our rotating column, where we look at London on film. It’s an opportunity to see how the city has been represented on the big screen over the years, how its landmarks and structures have been used (and abused) and how various genres and directors extract wildly different performances from its streets.

For this instalment, Sarah Cleary sets out into the seamy netherworld of 80s London and gets trapped in a neon-lit web of desire, deceit and destructiveness.

Welcome to the Electric Theatre. Please turn off your phones and refrain from talking for the duration of the entertainment.

(P.S. There are spoilers ahead, but this film was released over 25 years ago.)

“Your clients, do they ever want you back?” enquires the stout, cockney hard man. “Always” replies the stoic sex worker. “What, they fall in love with you?”

It’s at this early point in British neo-noir Mona Lisa (1986) that we, the audience, see our prickly anti-hero George (Bob Hoskins) for what he really is: despite his rough edges and criminal past, deep down he’s a little boy.

And with this profoundly naïve line of questioning his true colours are first revealed not only to us, but to the enigmatic Simone (Cathy Tyson). “Sometimes they fall for what they think I am,” she explains, bringing the film’s two most essential themes – identity and perception – to the forefront of the viewer’s mind.

This is a film very much concerned with the extent to which context shapes a person, and one context that George and Simone share is London. Mona Lisa not only holds up as a surprisingly delicate, emotionally mature piece of pulp fiction, but now also serves as a vivid and vital snapshot of a city.

Pimps and Pygmalions

We first meet George during the film’s opening titles, crossing Waterloo Bridge northwards as the sun rises on a new day. As Nat King Cole croons the title song on the soundtrack, we see George sit alone in a mist-shrouded Hyde Park - he’s just been released from prison after seven years and while he’s been inside, things have changed. His wife doesn’t want him anywhere near his teenage daughter anymore, his old neighbourhood is a lot less white than he’d remembered (he’s not thrilled about this), and the crime syndicate he’d once been a proud cog in has rebranded in his absence.

“This is a knocking shop,” George observes with palpable disdain upon his return to the gang’s old haunt. He’s right – Krays-esque crime boss Mortwell (Michael Caine) has indeed shifted the purview of his organisation entirely towards the sex industry. What exactly George did for Mortwell prior to his incarceration is never made clear, but he clearly regards his new role (driving high-class call girl Simone from job to job) as a step down.

Though an explicit comparison is never made, Simone is the titular Mona Lisa. She’s as bewitching as she is inscrutable, and George cannot make head nor tail of her. In his initial estimation, being that she’s a black sex worker, she ought to be his de facto social inferior – yet she can glide through upper crust hotels and look as though she’s meant to be there. George, by contrast, attracts disapproving glares with his geezer-ish dress sense and lairy demeanour. He ends up becoming Simone’s Pygmalion project, the lout she must makeover to better pass as her “date”.

It’s at this point that George begins to warm up to Simone. His bigotries are still very much in play – he describes her bluntly as a “tall, thin, black tart” to his best friend Thomas (Robbie Coltrane), but as she helps him to understand and navigate the unfamiliar world he has re-emerged into, he cannot hide his gratitude. Unfortunately, that gratitude soon gives way to a crush. 

Part of what makes Simone as intriguing to us as she is to George is the way in which writer-director Neil Jordan deftly sidesteps the age-old “hooker with a heart of gold” tropes. Cathy Tyson’s performance, too, avoids cliché – she’s willowy and elegant rather than waifish or raunchy, and there’s a steely hardness about her that feels authentic. It’s not until she asks George to search for a missing friend, Cathy (Kate Hardie), that she shows a vulnerable side. She spins George a yarn: she and Cathy were streetwalkers working side-by-side, under the watchful eye of a particularly vicious pimp, Anderson (Clarke Peters). Simone made a daring getaway, but Cathy is still out there, somewhere. George cannot help but be moved, especially when Cathy tells him that she can’t look for Cathy, “but you could.”

And with that, George sets off on a heroic quest deeper and deeper into a neon-lit netherworld, in search of a damsel in distress.

North London noir

It’s during George’s search for Cathy that London itself becomes a focal point. Jordan’s aesthetic approach to the city is singular, managing to successfully comprise both authentic squalor and an operatic sense of scale.

On one hand, he shoots the real sex shops and brothels George journeys through with a documentarian’s candour, letting these glum and deeply un-sexy spaces speak for themselves.  Tellingly authentic details like a kitchenette behind a beaded curtain in the corner of a dingy Soho strip club help to create an oppressive air of punishing mundanity. However, Jordan will in turn stage and shoot the backstreets of King’s Cross - where baby-faced sex workers ply their trade by the dozen – as though they were a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape lit by Dario Argento.

The accumulative effect is disorientating, at once nightmarelike and starkly vivid. In this way, Mona Lisa is a truly classical work of noir filmmaking. Just as old masters like Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang helped to define a new visual vocabulary of urban Americana through a potent combination of realism and expressionism, here Jordan seeks to define his own cinematic London through a similar stylistic synthesis.