Film Review: B. Monkey (1998)
When Michael Radford, barely two years away from the Oscar-winning triumph of Il Postino, delivered a gangster melodrama set in a Cool Britannia London, Miramax responded by locking it in a bunker for the better part of three years. The decision was, on the face of it, explicable. This was not the sunlit romantic postcard that had vaulted Radford into the front rank of European directors; it was a nocturnal, jazz-scored story of armed robbery, bad company and sexual confusion, with an Italian actress little known outside cultish circles in the lead. Neither heritage picture nor geezer movie, it fitted no convenient marketing slot. That the studio's indifference — and the post-production squabbling that attended it — did the film lasting damage is beyond doubt. What is more surprising is how much of it survives anyway.
Alan Furnace (Jared Harris) is a quiet, unassuming primary school teacher who has spent his whole life pining for something richer and more dangerous than the staff room can offer. His closest approach to that ideal is a night job as a disc jockey on a hospital radio service, spinning Django Reinhardt for an audience too ill to escape him. One evening, in a London bar, he stumbles across Beatrice (Asia Argento), a beautiful and enigmatic Italian, and falls hopelessly in love. Beatrice falls for Alan too, though for rather different reasons. By day she is a clerk in a large firm; by night she tops up her income with burglary and armed robbery, a trade that has earned her the underworld nickname of "B. Monkey" — the woman who can get into anything. She has grown tired of that life and wants to settle down, and the unassuming Alan looks to her like an ideal exit route. Their idyll is complicated by her friend and former partner in crime Paul (Rupert Everett), who owes money to some very dangerous men. Beatrice decides to help him, and, together with Paul's lover Bruno (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), undertakes one more job.
The plot's bones are pure genre, and Radford knows it. He keeps a firm grip on the narrative, and he is served by first-rate craftspeople: Ashley Rowe's photography, Sophie Becher's designs and Valentin Breton Des Loys's costumes give the film a sheen that its budget hardly deserved, the musical choices are immaculate throughout, and the cast is on decent form. Foremost among them is the woman in the title role. Asia Argento, daughter of the rather more famous Dario, had been seen by our audiences first in the less than happy assignment of a policewoman in The Stendhal Syndrome; here she is far better used, in a part that maximises her erotic potential and gives her something to do with it. Her partner Jared Harris is altogether more lifeless as the modest schoolteacher, and the impression is saved chiefly by Rupert Everett and Jonathan Rhys Meyers — even if their homosexual characters look rather too much like a pair of clichés to be entirely convincing.
Setting aside the finale, which by its sheer predictability never strays far from the conventions of its genre, B. Monkey is a likeable and interesting little film, and very much worth a look.
It is also, in retrospect, a curious artefact of its moment — and that moment is not 1998. The film was shot in 1996, and everything in it belongs to that year: the trip-hop on the soundtrack, the Portishead on the jukebox, the jazz club as a shorthand for bohemian authenticity, the polyamorous ménage between Beatrice, Paul and Bruno, an arrangement that in 1998 mainstream British cinema still found mildly exotic. By the time it actually reached British screens in November 1998, the landscape had shifted. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels had opened that August and was busy teaching audiences that a British crime film meant mockney patter, shoot-outs and a soundtrack of pub rock. Into that slipstream came Radford's wistful, romantic, distinctly un-gobby noir, and it looked out of step.
There is a lineage here that Miramax had no interest in selling. The proper ancestor of B. Monkey is not Lock, Stock but Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa — the quiet man, the exotic woman, the criminal world as an arena for a doomed romantic education. Scala Productions, the outfit behind it, had been responsible for The Crying Game, and Stephen Woolley's fingerprints are all over the film's interest in desire that refuses to sort itself neatly into categories. Yet where The Crying Game had the benefit of a genuinely startling twist, B. Monkey coasts on charm.
Behind the camera, the film's troubled gestation has since acquired an unhappy documentary value. Michael Caton-Jones, the original director, left after a row with Harvey Weinstein over the casting of Sophie Okonedo — a row in which, by Caton-Jones's own later account, Weinstein's judgement of the actress's “shagability” played an unseemly part. Argento, who replaced her, would later allege far worse treatment at the same hands. She also conducted an affair with Radford during the shoot, which may go some way towards explaining the film's peculiar, charged intimacy. Add a score partly credited to Luis Bacalov, the composer who had won his Oscar for Il Postino, and you have a production that is almost a case study in the transatlantic financing arrangements of 1990s British cinema: American money, American final cut, and an American distributor free to sit on the finished article until it went stale. The film took all of $39,371 in the United States.
And yet the waiting, on balance, was worth it. B. Monkey is not a great film, and it is not even Radford's best film of the decade. It is a small, slightly dated, faintly melancholy piece that mistakes atmosphere for depth and resolves itself far too tidily. But it has genuine heat in it, a real feel for nocturnal London, and in Argento a star who understands exactly what the camera wants from her. In an era when British cinema was busy congratulating itself on its own cheekiness, this was one of the few films of the period prepared to be sincerely, unironically romantic about people behaving badly.
Rating 5/10
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