Venice Film Festival 2021: Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, Illusions perdues, The Promises | Festivals & Awards

The aggressively inventive Any Lily Amirpour was at Venice in 2016 with “The Bad Batch,” and while it won a Special Jury Prize it also … what’s the word? Polarized critics. I loved it myself but many felt its exceptionally feral depiction of a future dystopia was a little too balls-to-the-wall, and problematic to boot. It made very little of a splash on it U.S. release, failing to impact the zeitgeist to the extent that Disney named one of its “Star Wars” streaming series “The Bad Batch” and nobody said “boo.”

It may seem perverse to describe a motion picture that opens with a young woman in a straitjacket psychically compelling a mental hospital worker to stab herself multiple times with a nail cutter as reflecting the softer side of its director, but honest, the New-Orleans-set-and-shot “Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon” evolves into a fractured and at times ultraviolent kind of fairy tale. Jeon Jong-seo, of “Burning” fame, plays the title girl with the power. Once she escapes the asylum, that power affects the lives of a dutiful cop (Craig Robinson)—who moments before his fateful meeting with Mona gets a fortune cookie with the message “Forget What You Know”—a tough single mom/stripper (Kate Hudson), and her sensitive son Charlie (Evan Whitten). Oh, and a goofy drug dealer named Fuzz (Ed Skrein, whose performance initially struck me as a little too Vanilla Ice but who ended up growing on me—he was a fave rave with the festival press audience too).

Amirpour drinks in the lurid neon of Bourbon Street and the depths of that title blood moon with what feels like an unquenchable thirst. The story of the outcast and the wise child going up against the world is not a new one—like I said, the movie is a fairy tale—but Amirpour’s rendition of it is bracing, funny, and genuinely warm. This sincere attempt at audience outreach ought to do the trick when the film sees release.

I saw two French pictures here. If the country doesn’t seem to deliver a whole lot of cutting-edge work on the festival circuit these days, French cinema perpetually does well with certain conventional modes. “Illusions perdues,” directed by Xavier Gianolli from Balzac’s novel, is set in early 19^th century France. The perennial tale of the young provincial who seeks artistic and romantic fulfillment in the big city and finds corruption, betrayal and heartache, it stars Benjamin Voisin (who’s got a bit of a heart-throbbier Tom Hulce vibe to him) as Lucian, a dreamy poet in love with a noblewoman. After they steal away to Paris together, his intoxication begins. The movie is rife with detailed observations on the growing scandal sheets of the inchoate newspaper business of the time, and its evocations of “fake news” feel like social commentary for today. But what Balzac chronicled was real enough in its time, so one can believe that GIanolli’s treatment of the source material is saying there’s nothing new under the sun.