Mona Lisa is a British film from 1986, directed by Neil Jordan and starring Bob Hoskins, Cathy Tyson and Michael Caine.

London in the 1980s was a place of unashamed prosperity, of conspicuous consumption, yuppies in fast cars and designer suits. After the grimy 1970s, all industrial disputes and national decline, British commerce and the financial sector were on the up. People were making more money than they could spend, though they weren't afraid to spend it. It was a world of superficiality, of images, where the outward appearance of someone was far more important than their morals or humanity. But it was also a place of cruelty. Anything was for sale, and anyone was for sale, from high-class prostitutes to underage runaway drug-addicts. And you didn't have to look far below the surface to see the suffering.

This is the world of Mona Lisa. Bob Hoskins plays George, a small-time criminal, who was sent to jail at the end of the 1970s, and emerges in the middle of yuppie London, still in his cheap flared suit (long out of fashion even when he was put away) and his old-fashioned worldview. He was owed by underworld boss Mortwell (Michael Caine): George has gone to jail for him and kept his mouth shut, and he expects something in return. So Mortwell, sinisterly stroking a white rabbit like a Bond villain, gives him what should be a simple task, chauffeuring sophisticated black call-girl Simone (Cathy Tyson) around London, to top hotels and luxurious mansions.

At first he views her with contempt, and she views him with amused contempt. There is comedy in the culture clash; George claims he is simply, unavoidably "cheap", but Simone tries to dress him up in designer suits. However this is only a brief comic interlude. George is upset by her lifestyle, harbouring some kind of love for her. But though Simone appears ice-cold emotionally, and despite their vicious quarrels, a bond forms between them. She gets George to help her track down one of her old friends, a girl she used to know when both of them were working the streets of King's Cross, London. George finds himself thrown deeper and deeper into a world of depravity he never imagined, but he's always trying to play the white knight, chivalric to the last.

Bob Hoskins's performance is remarkable, a chief reason for the film's success. He had played pathetic before (in Pennies From Heaven on television) and brutal (in British gangster film The Long Good Friday) but in Mona Lisa he is able to combine the two. George is always sympathetic in his confusion; his brutality and naivety are just part of his desire to do good. Hoskins gives George an extraordinary moral quality despite his faults: he is a deeply flawed man, a criminal, who has ruined his marriage and nearly destroyed his relationship with his daughter, and is set to return to a life of crime.

Yet he is still the audience's window into this world, as he tried to make sense of the strange moral landscape he was in. Scouring strip bars and red-light districts to the incongruous sound of Phil Collins's Against All Odds, he is as stunned as we are: the vice industry is nothing like the simple criminal life of armed robbery and theft he came from. Since he went away, everything has got sicker, uglier, more perverted, less human. Hoskins discovers the truth little by little; his illusions about human relationships are shattered, and he learns, as we do, the brutal facts about the life of a street prostitute. His easy ideas about the relationship between the sexes are shaken up: he acts to protect both the prostitutes and his daughter, but he finds Simone is rather better able than he is to look after herself.

The film is obsessed with images and surfaces, with illusions and masks. George's one friend Thomas (Robbie Coltrane excellent in an understated straight role) describes George's life in the terms of pulp crime fiction, and sells plastic sculptures of plates of spaghetti that look lifelike but are inedible. Later, George and Simone wear comically cheap plastic sunglasses and stroll on the pier at Brighton like a holiday-making couple, but this too proves an easily-shattered illusion. The ending of the film similarly refuses to play out like a fairytale: no big happy endings, no Dickensian restitution, but no Taxi Driver baroque either.

The title reflects the same theme of artifice, drawing on Nat King Cole's song of the same name:

Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa,
Or just a cold and lonely, lovely work of art?
George's attraction to Simone mirrors this, and she is just as inscrutable for him as the mysterious smile of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. In this respect, Simone is just one example of a world he has no understanding of or control over. He is the archetypal simple man confronted by a unknowable woman; but Simone is rendered this way by unimaginable horrors.

For a world of illusions, the violence in the film is real and shocking, sudden bursts of brutality that are over almost as quickly as they have begun. George grabs a pimp's head through a car window and bashes it off the sides of the frame. He knocks someone to the ground and kicks him in the stomach and groin. The attacks are too sharp to be exciting, almost too quick to register. It is as though the violence is trying to bust its way out of the film, breach the surface and achieve reality.

Mona Lisa is one of the most important and one of the best British films of the 1980s. No other movie describes so well the shiny surface of 1980s Thatcherite Britain and the cruelty underneath it. For a film so obsessed with surface and appearance, it is rich and multi-layered in its portrayal of a corrupt and fallen world. You can play a game just spotting all the masks, illusions, fictions and falsehoods. Or you can be swept up in the emotional depth of the story, a tale of crime and betrayal, of love, redemption and revenge, laden with twists and shocks. Or you can study the film's view of a corrupt society, George's old-fashioned view of women and morality up against a brightly-lit amoral world of extreme luxury and extreme pain.

You could compare it to Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), a very different portrayal of 1980s corruption in London, that substitutes formalism for feeling, to a very different but equally devastating effect. Or the violence and illusion of American Psycho (novel by Bret Easton Ellis 1991, film 2000), another tale of life in a world of amoral greed, but Mona Lisa is about the losers, not the winners, and about those, like Simone, who are both winners and losers, who win the wealth of the world but lose (or misplace) their souls. Taxi Driver (1976)is perhaps the American version, bigger, bloodier, more solipsistic and less socially concerned. Stephen Poliakoff's Close My Eyes (1991) is perhaps the other great movie of 1980s London, a tale of yuppies, decay and moral degeneracy played out through the metaphor of brother-sister incest, but it is a film anchored in the detached cool of wealthy Alan Rickman rather than the feverish desperation of Mona Lisa's leads.

Never before or since has Neil Jordan combined his technical ability to shock, confuse and challenge his audience together with a storyline that deals in such a head-on fashion with human life, with pain and suffering and real emotion. The Crying Game is little more than a game itself; his debut Angel, the story of musicial Stephen Rea's involvement with the IRA, approached the same mix of personal emotion with political strife, but was technically far inferior. But Mona Lisa is vary rare, not just in Britain but in world cinema, for its combination of intellect and feeling, a film that excites both the mind and the emotions.

Main cast
Bob Hoskins - George
Cathy Tyson - Simone
Michael Caine - Mortwell
Robbie Coltrane - Thomas
Clarke Peters - Anderson
Kate Hardie - Cathy
Zoë Nathenson - Jeannie
Sammi Davis - May
Rod Bedall - Torry
Joe Brown - Dudley
Pauline Melville - Dawn
Hossein Karimbeik - Raschid
Main credits
Director - Neil Jordan
Screenplay - Neil Jordan, David Leland
Producers - Patrick Cassavetti, Stephen Woolley
Cinematography - Roger Pratt
Editor - Lesley Walker
Production Design - Jamie Leonard
Music - Michael Kamen
Sound Editor - Jonathan Bates

Handmade Films, United Kingdom, 1986.