I love this movie like it's a woman. The reviewers have once again missed the ferry -- what we have here, folks, is an honest to God(ard) B-movie tone poem, an exercise in sensual, physical, SURFACE beauty that will send any self-respecting Keatsian aesthete straight to Hyperion ( the palace of visionaries, not the Miramax book division. ) Thanks to director Michael Radford -- who I wrongly assumed to be eighty or ninety years of age on the basis of his last movie, Il Postino -- B. Monkey is as seductive as the single bar of red neon that illuminates the opening shot. The movie will surely gain minor but devoted cult status in the years to come, while its lead actress, Asia Argento, will probably have to buy a house with very tall gates. ( Because I'm quite tall myself, and a good climber. )
How to describe B. Monkey without resorting to banal adjectives like you'd find on cartons of Haagen-Daz, "luscious" and "velvety"? Well, I see it as sort of a disreputable cousin to Bertolucci's ravishing Besieged; other people, no doubt less pretentious, will compare it to the kind of movie Steven Soderbergh has been making lately -- a cool, jazz-inflected, proudly inconsequential genre flick. But Radford has his own style -- impossibly trendy -- and he's a genius at evoking the loneliness and beauty of big cities everywhere.
This is a director's movie, to be sure, but make no mistake: Asia Argento is no slouch when it comes to decorating the frame. She's compact, tough, and fierce-eyed, her unconventional beauty only enhanced by a strong nose that would look terrific underneath a centurion's helmet. Like Louise Brooks or Anna Karina, she's a vamp for the ages, mesmerizing for no good reason ( much like the movie itself. ) It doesn't hurt that she's matched with the brilliant Jared Harris, whose interior performance perfectly complements her exterior one, or that the atavistically lordly Rupert Everett is on hand to do his Wilde thing. Even pretty boy Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is a bit more animated than usual; he throws open car doors briskly and with conviction.
Yes, the plot is inane. No, it doesn't really matter. B. Monkey, in the end, amounts to no more nor less than the sum of its impressionistic moments. The world is a glittering tomb where we all languish in oh-so-gorgeous isolation, or something. As Jared Harris says early in the movie, deejaying at a local hospital: "This next one is for all you romantics out there. Get well soon."
