The big uneasy
Kate Hudson grifts her way through ‘Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon’
VENICE LIDO, Italy – “Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon,” a wild and wonderfully weird ride through New Orleans’ fabled French Quarter as it riffs on classic monster movies, premiered Sunday at the Venice Film Festival.
Written and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour in sweltering heat on location, the movie begins under a full moon as Mona Lisa (North Korea’s Jeon Jong-seo), a strait-jacketed inmate at a mental asylum, escapes.
She has mind-control abilities and can make anyone she meets do whatever she wants, like having Craig Robinson’s cop shoot himself in the leg with his own gun.
As lethal as she might be, Mona Lisa, in lock-up for a dozen years since she was 10, is an innocent, almost child-like person.
She is befriended first by Fuzz (Ed Skrein), a hipster drug dealer, and then by Kate Hudson’s single mother Bonnie, a pole dancer on
Bourbon Street.
Hudson’s terrifically surprising as a woman with a complicated relationship with her 9-year-old son who is always looking for any way to improve her lot. That means taking Mona Lisa to ATMs and having customers “give” her $500 cash “presents.”
When did Hudson know she had locked into this tough yet tender hustler?
“I felt I showed up for Bonnie at 3:30 in the morning when I was lying on concrete in New Orleans in 104 degree heat. We really do crazy things for the movies!
“There’s a part of my soul that has a lot of Bonnie in it. She’s a fighter and survivor and very much a warrior. What a liberating character to play.”
Hudson was with her director, Robinson and Skrein at an afternoon press conference. Jong-seo, filming in Korea, couldn’t attend.
“For me cinema is fantasy,” Amirpour said. “I love to create a ‘ride’ and maybe the film itself feels in a way like a fairy tale.
“This movie is the love I had as a child for a certain kind of adventure movie: ‘The Neverending Story,’ ‘Back to the Future’ or ‘Terminator 2.’
“Honestly,” she added, “I wrote this before this (pandemic) world we’re all experiencing now. It’s about how she’s locked up and gets free — and we all want to get the (expletive) out of the box.
“Mona Lisa is my hero. She gets to just continually change form and reinvent yourself. She’s (initially) like a feral beast, then a child and then a monster. That’s freedom. That’s exciting. I hope people see her as weird — my kind of weirdo.”