For her third feature, Ana Lily Amirpour returns to the methodology she adopted for her impressive 2015 debut, the Iranian vampire movie A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and though the dialogue was in Farsi (Amirpour grew up in the U.S. but is of Iranian heritage) and the setting was supposed to be Iran, it was filmed in California with Iranian expats. Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon evokes a similar feeling of dislocation. Though filmed on location in New Orleans, the disparate range of types suggest a hodgepodge of notions that must have coursed through Amirpour’s imagination while devising the story, which swerves wildly through and around several genres. 

The titular protagonist (Jeon Jong-seo) is presented from the outset as suffering from some sort of neurological impairment that has confined her to a mental institution for what may have been her entire life. We take the orderlies’ less-than-reliable word that she is of Korean descent but that’s all the info we will ever get about her background. The staff subject this young, mute woman to offhanded cruelty, and one employee goes too far while cutting her nails. Mona Lisa Lee (Her real name or a nickname?) responds by locking eyes with her tormentor and taking control of her motor functions, making her stab herself repeatedly with the nail cutters. She then makes her escape onto the streets of the Big Easy, where, desperately searching for food, she encounters colorful characters galore, including a sympathetic but somewhat skeevy drug dealer (Ed Skrein) who buys her junk food (a running joke that runs out of gas pretty quickly) and a stripper named Bonnie (Kate Hudson), who, after witnessing Mona Lisa’s mind control shtick, recruits her to get people patronizing ATMs to surrender their cash. Eventually, the cop investigating the stabbing (Craig Robinson) tracks down the two and, after suffering himself under Mona Lisa’s gaze—she gets him to shoot himself in the foot—goes all out to capture them. Awkward chases and confrontations with underworld scum ensue. 

Though there’s a definite comic vibe to the whole enterprise, Amirpour can’t sustain any sort of tone. The viewer is meant to commisserate with Mona Lisa’s predicament, which amounts to that of an innocent just coming to terms with the wiles of the world, in particular, Americans who can be selfish but, deep down, still lean toward moral awareness. What they never are, however, is responsible. It’s hard to muster any kind of fellow feeling for Bonnie, who in addition to having a casual flair for larceny is a negligent single mother, even though I assume Amirpour wants us to identify with her. As for Mona Lisa, she remains an unmarked white board even as she slowly picks up some verbal capabilities and develops a sense of potential for her future. As a character she lacks qualities. She’s simply a vehicle for ideas that weren’t thought out very clearly.

Opens Nov. 17 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon home page in Japanese

photo (c) Institution of Production LLC