Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk
The Monk is a melo dramatic period piece with horror movie trimmings. Occasionally incoherent but never boring, it’s packed with strange images figures in peaked hoods scurrying across windswept plains, nuns in opalescent white veils; a bouquet that wilts quickly and then bursts into blue flames, a baby being pecked at by crows. At one point, as the camera stands still, a group of men walk past it. They have crowns of candles on their heads, drips of hardened wax stripe their shoulders.
“The Monk” was directed and co-written by Dominik Moll, a German born French filmmaker best known for his clever thrillers (“With A Friend Like Harry,” “Lemming”). It stars Vincent Cassel as Ambrosio, a Capuchin friar with an odd hand shaped birthmark on his shoulder.
Ambrosio (Cassel), who wears a beard that effectively covers half of his face diverting attention away from his mouth and onto his brooding eyes was abandoned as an infant on the steps of the monastery. Raised to be a model monk (pious, observant, reasonable), he quickly became an excellent confessor and orator, much beloved by both his Capuchin brothers and the townspeople who come to hear him speak. Cassel gives Ambrosio a convincing holier-than-thou confidence.
But “The Monk” is actually about Ambrosio’s descent into sin and madness adapted from Matthew Lewis’ influential though hardly classic 1796 novel of nearly the same title so we know perversely exciting events lay ahead murder, incestuous desire, pacts with Satan. Because this stuff is so over the top sensationalistic and then some Luis Bunuel tried to make it into a movie, my generation grew up with a poster for “The Monk” on the wall in our college dorm room; Bunuel eventually couldn’t raise the funds to shoot his “Monk,” so the Surrealist critic and filmmaker Ado Kyrou made an interesting film starring spaghetti Western icon Franco Nero, of all people based on Bunuel’s script–I won’t go on. But I could.
Moll’s movie flirts with Surrealism without ever fully declaring itself a work of art, his “Monk” is primarily a classy B-movie, eager to provide Gothic atmosphere, nudity and mild shocks. It reminded me at times of a Hammer horror film (like “Curse of Frankenstein” or Christopher Lee’s “Dracula”) except that the Hammer movies were visually opulent and Moll’s is often austere and grayish. The interior shots are dimly lit and shadowy, which is appropriate given that they’re set in 16th-century stone buildings, but it also just looks cool. The costumes aren’t gaudy or over-stylized; you could swap them into any number of other period pieces without alarming anyone.
During its first 15 minutes or so, you might mistake “The Monk,” with its cautious pacing and hushed tone, for a restrained religious drama: long close ups on Cassel as he listens intently to some sad story told by one character about another character whose life has been ruined by some tragic event.
But around the 15-minute mark shortly after Ambrosio describes to a fellow monk (Sergi Lopez) his dream of seeing a woman in red who dances before him but never shows her face Moll plunges us into what turns out to be an extended dream sequence from which we never emerge. Every subsequent scene inches further toward nightmare.
The images become more daring; Moll plays around with superimposed pictures, diffuse light, silent-movie-style iris shots, even throws in a few theatrical lighting tricks like a spotlight picking out a character in a crowd. The effect isn’t so much hallucinatory as hypnotic. You realize you’re not watching a story about Ambrosio’s fall from grace, you’re watching the fall from grace itself.
Which is fine, except that it makes the plot of “The Monk” involving lots of twisty intrigue concerning a masked leper who lives at the monastery and an aristocrat’s elaborate courting of a woman who loves but is loved by Ambrosio seem all the more perfunctory and insubstantial.
By the end, it’s hard to care for Ambrosio or what becomes of him, he has become irrelevant to the imagery.
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