Mona Lisa: The Portrait of London
Beyond the plot and the tragedy of main heroes, cinematography is able to reflect the life of the piece of the world where the game of actions takes place. In Neil Jordan’s multi-faceted movie Mona Lisa, London reveals the depths of its underworld: prostitution, crimes, and violence. George, the protagonist of the story, becomes the guide who leads the audience through the streets of London, its representatives, and their hardships on the lines of fortune. From the very first scene, the audience sees the highlight of London that changes fast, and less than ten years could be enough to face the striking difference. George served seven years in prison, and now he drives an old Jaguar. Seven years is the term …show more content…
As George approaches the luxurious hotel, the doorman scans his shoes, differentiating him from the people who might be the hotel residents. He meets Simone, a black prostitute, to pick her up from the hotel. The scene where he first meets her underlines the class difference on the level of high and low position of the characters. While Simone stands high, she is shown in a princess-like outfit looking down on servant George. When she levels down with him, she turns into a working class prostitute in a simple coat, who would be an equal person to a criminal driver. However, the man and the woman do not feel equal. The shots exaggerate the racial, gender, and class difference as they do not appear together at the same time in the scene in the car. In the following hotel, where George takes his arrogant passenger, he encounters ignorance by the waiter only because the humble driver does not fit the client’s image of those he …show more content…
She claims that both black men and women have vividly negative attributes. The scene where George attempts to see his daughter at his wife’s house reveals the contrast between a perfect house of a white person and the black neighborhood, where his family lives, full of garbage. The author also comments, “London is represented as a place where a sleazy underworld, led by working class villains and fed on by ‘foreigners’, is in control” (Young, 1996, p. 124-125). In such an environment, George appears to be the representative of the old England in the hostile and ‘foreign’
Beyond the plot and the tragedy of main heroes, cinematography is able to reflect the life of the piece of the world where the game of actions takes place. In Neil Jordan’s multi-faceted movie Mona Lisa, London reveals the depths of its underworld: prostitution, crimes, and violence. George, the protagonist of the story, becomes the guide who leads the audience through the streets of London, its representatives, and their hardships on the lines of fortune. From the very first scene, the audience sees the highlight of London that changes fast, and less than ten years could be enough to face the striking difference. George served seven years in prison, and now he drives an old Jaguar. Seven years is the term …show more content…
As George approaches the luxurious hotel, the doorman scans his shoes, differentiating him from the people who might be the hotel residents. He meets Simone, a black prostitute, to pick her up from the hotel. The scene where he first meets her underlines the class difference on the level of high and low position of the characters. While Simone stands high, she is shown in a princess-like outfit looking down on servant George. When she levels down with him, she turns into a working class prostitute in a simple coat, who would be an equal person to a criminal driver. However, the man and the woman do not feel equal. The shots exaggerate the racial, gender, and class difference as they do not appear together at the same time in the scene in the car. In the following hotel, where George takes his arrogant passenger, he encounters ignorance by the waiter only because the humble driver does not fit the client’s image of those he …show more content…
She claims that both black men and women have vividly negative attributes. The scene where George attempts to see his daughter at his wife’s house reveals the contrast between a perfect house of a white person and the black neighborhood, where his family lives, full of garbage. The author also comments, “London is represented as a place where a sleazy underworld, led by working class villains and fed on by ‘foreigners’, is in control” (Young, 1996, p. 124-125). In such an environment, George appears to be the representative of the old England in the hostile and ‘foreign’