Coming behind the stand Transparent s drug dealerMagnetic Tracy Lisette takes on the title role as a woman who returns home to her dying and long-estranged mother (Patricia Clarkson) in Andrea Palaoro’s Venice competition. Monica. It is a very rare case of a trans actor occupying almost every frame of a fiction film. The result, unfortunately, does not live up to the promise of the occasion, turning the character’s journey into fodder for a slow exercise in formalism.
As in his previous films, Medeas s A-N-AThe director (in collaboration with his writing partner Orlando Tirado) tries to squeeze the tension out of the visual and narrative rigor, most notably the static camera work, the deliberate pacing and the short fairytale story. But A-N-A had the masterful Charlotte Rampling seeming to invent new ways to embody the misery before our eyes and Medeas It was imbued with atmospheric terror in slow motion. They were creepy, self-consciously independent works (think Haneke Light), but, in their art-house déjà vu form, effective.
Monica
Minimalist and minimally convincing.
MonicaIn comparison, it feels like a movie constantly struggling to connect. Lisette has a regal presence, her regal beauty tempered with sadness and serenity. But the film doesn’t delve deep enough into that melancholy, and Palaoro’s treatment of the character, especially when it comes to her gender identity, is strangely seductive. If Clarkson’s cancer-stricken Eugenia acknowledges Monica’s sanity as the person her daughter was, if Monica is essentially “passing away,” it is a melodramatic, almost Almodovarian reflection on Clarkson’s cancer-stricken Eugenia. inconsistent with the low-pulse realism of the film. This also precludes the fact that Monica rob your main character of any personality, emotion, or experience behind the same handful of desperate blows.
Dipping this recessionary central figure into an ancient mix of tropes and themes (a difficult comeback, a terminally ill mother, a traumatized LGBTQ child), Palaoro does nothing particularly surprising or insightful. Monica It reproduces something we’ve seen countless times before on flagship devices.
The formal speed is more unpleasant than the familiarity of the material, as it spoils the film’s sincerity; It is vain that Palaoro leans towards his minimalist images, but underfeeds his story and the woman who floats through it. Such an imbalance is a miscalculation: bad studies of alienation are common on the international festival circuit; Fully realized trans leads, not so much.
Palaoro begins with Monica (Lisette) on a tanning bed, then shows her diverting unwanted attention from a noisy ball in a parking lot. Thus, the director focuses from the beginning on the physicality of the character, an emphasis that the film maintains to the exclusion of his inner life and to his own detriment.
After receiving an unexpected call, Monica, who lives in Los Angeles and works as a massage therapist and webcam girl, gets in her car and drives away. The square proportion suggests her isolation, an impression reinforced by the impersonal nature of her interactions in the opening scenes: leaving a voicemail, falling absently on a customer’s back, taking a picture for a family of tourists. Palaoro and DP Katelyn Arizmendi (Swallow) are often photographed with their heads turned away from the camera or with their face covered in 1990s Julia Roberts locks. , or by cutting off the head at the top of the frame. Palaoro never bridges that gap between viewer and subject, which is unfortunate for a film that seems to want to shock us with a story of forgiveness and healing.
When Monica arrives in a leafy midwestern suburb (filmed in Cincinnati), Laura, her brother Paul’s good-natured wife (a very good Emily Browning), greets her. The reception is fresher in her spacious and elegantly decorated childhood home, where Eugenia (Clarkson), bedridden, cared for by the holy nurse Letty (Adriana Barraza), refuses to take her medication and doesn’t want anyone new in her space. It seems like no one, including Monica, is going to tell Eugenia that this new person is her son, who Eugenia hasn’t seen since she came out as a teenager.
Monica still succeeds, learning some grooming routines, reconnecting with Paul (Joshua Close), and bonding with her three children. He also smokes a lot and looks the other way; Several desperate phone calls are made to an ex named Jimmy; sipping a drink in a bad mood while waiting for a date that never shows up; And he has a night with a prop that sits next to him with some very heavy pickup lines.
Monica It certainly avoids the nervous confrontations and false catharsis typical of dying parent dramas, erring on the side of overcorrection. None of the characters say or do anything too surprising, and Palaoro punctuates their conversations with long pauses, so the scenes feel bloated with meaning that doesn’t exist. The film takes on a relaxing and gripping quality, as if it were going underwater.
The director’s insistently flattened style and tone are counterproductive. Striking images, like Monica’s niece and nephew in the car in front of her, their faces turned toward her with frozen, curious gazes, come and go with little tilt or impact. Lisette is speechless the moment Monica doesn’t meet Eugenia’s searching gaze, her eyes move in all directions, looking for an escape; For a few seconds he is still a child, helpless in the face of his powerful mother. This is one of the only spots where the film’s anesthetic haze dissipates.
Between hormonal shock, sex work, objectification, difficulty finding romantic connection, and family abandonment, Monica It is factual in its description of the challenges trans people face. But there’s a kind of hardness to the film’s vision, a sense that it downplays Monica’s trauma.
A short break comes midway as Monica is getting ready for the night. Spraying her face and dancing around the room to the absurdly captivating sound of O-Zone’s Romanian pop anthem “Dragostea Din Tei” (beautifully chosen from the diegetic soundtrack) – eyes closed, hips swaying, smiling serenely – Monica enjoys the private moment. Ecstasy and cinema give life.
“Most days,” Monica responds when her brother asks if she’s happy, and that’s the only view we have of her and the movie. Monica Perhaps if they had given the character space to show the full spectrum of his humanity.
Source: Hollywood Reporter
Emily Jhon is a product and service reviewer at Gossipify, known for her honest evaluations and thorough analysis. With a background in marketing and consumer research, she offers valuable insights to readers. She has been writing for Gossipify for several years and has a degree in Marketing and Consumer Research from the University of Oxford.
