The Monkey's Mask

No evidence just a smell of sex and violence.

Hired to find a young girl, Mickey Norris, Jill Fitzpatrick delves into the seamier side of the Sydney poetry scene, finding herself drawn to the missing girl's lecturer, Professor Diana Maitland. But when Mickey turns up dead, Jill enlists her new lover's help to get to grips with the case. As their budding relationship disintegrates however, she starts to question just how involved Diana, and her husband Nick, are in the murder.

The Monkey's Mask is something of an oddity; a noir film set in Australia, something that insinuates itself into the typical noir pretensions. Whilst Susie Porter's (Better Than Sex, Teesh and Trude) self-reflections in her voice-over, slightly cynical and possibly world-weary fit the classic cliché to a T, you can see how the Noir clichés bounce against the Sydney locale, skewing everything slightly off-kilter. Nice little touches like the Emo/Goth poetry night, Susie's underarm hair on display as she answers the phone, her crappy golden Sedan packed full of PI gear. There's also an interesting use of lighting when Susie explores the missing girl's room, a florid pink casting everything in its sheen, even Jill's skin, conflicting the often dark hues of the classic noir films. Noir is always noir, but here it is more malleable than one might ordinarily think.

Whilst based upon the book by Dorothy Porter, the film has been deliberately sexed-up, Susie Porter and Kelly McGillis (Top Gun, The Accused) sharing several sex scenes, and parading about naked for a fair chunk of the film. And curiously, a one-second flash of the husband's penis, somewhat off-putting in a film I admit mostly watching just for the f/f sex scenes, but not exactly out of place in the story itself. Sex, whether the initial scenes of making love, to the rougher fucking as the film progresses, is weaved throughout the plot. Who was Mickey sleeping with and writing her (god-awful) poetry to and about? Does Diana have any real feelings towards Jill, or is it a purely physical affair for her? Just what does Nick really think about his wife sleeping with another woman? The poetry, whilst the trappings of this film, plays second fiddle to the fornication that dominates the story.

The film is framed into stanzas, each one beginning with a shot of Susie Porter's gorgeous eyes, and a brief heading. The book was written in poetic verse, so it's good to see that not all of the trappings of the novel have been discarded in favour of the nudity (So I like story with my naked chicks, sue me!).

I liked the film, I really did, but it felt lacking to me. The plot was skinned down too much to make room for the sex, and yet the sex wasn't especially memorable either. There was only really one scene that felt like it belonged in the film, where they have sex after Jill watches the recording of Mickey's last recital, and the guilt she feels after having been choked to reach orgasm, in mimicry of the girl's death. Everything else was too thin.

Susie Porter looks fantastic in the lead role, a cute butchiness to her appearance and mannerisms, whilst still maintaining her feminism. Kelly McGillis on the other hand, veers from looking gorgeous to mummified, the effects of her prolonged drug abuse having taken its toll upon her body. Her acting here though is worth noting, how she keeps her performance level, despite the increasing insight into her character's depravity, whether her sexual proclivities or her prevalent state of looking down upon everyone, minimising their importance in the world at large in comparison to herself.

The most interesting performance in this film though, belongs to Marton Csokas (Evilenko, Æon Flux) as Diana's trophy husband, Nick. I actually felt a certain amount of sympathy towards him in how he stoically bore his wife's infidelity, and his empathy towards the situation Jill found herself in with regards to the affair. Of course, with the revelations the film goes on to explore, his previous actions and words take on new light, and Nick Maitland becomes an even more interesting character.

Curiously enough, there's no big fight, no gunplay, almost no real violence at all in this film. Apart from a few graphic crime photographs of Mickey Norris, all of the disturbance in the film is carried over by the characters attitudes towards Mickey, towards each other, and towards the art they claim to devote themselves to. There's no big rousing climax to the story, just a subdued sort of squib, that whilst tying everything up fairly neatly, fails to really satisfy.

The Monkey's Mask is a decent watch, but it fails to meet any expectations of the various genres it inhabits. Not steamy enough for a potboiler, not twisty enough for noir, not deep enough for psychological, not suspenseful enough for a thriller. Just a reasonable timefiller for an hour and a half.

5/10

-- Reviewed on October the 2^nd, 2007.

Find more details about The Monkey's Mask over at The Internet Movie Database.