In the early hours of the morning, a watchman at the Louvre makes a shocking discovery...The Mona Lisa has lost her celebrated smile. Under assumptions that the painting is inauthentic, or that it has been vandalized, scientists are called in to perform numerous tests, ultimately concluding that it is, unquestionably, da Vinci's authentic masterpiece, with no evidence of adulteration. The matter becomes even more perplexing when replicas and photo images of the portrait are found to have also changed expression. She now appears mournful, pensive, and hopeless...a sad countenance which initializes a global contagion of deep despair. Soon, there's nary a smile left in all the world, and it's ensuingly surmised that this sweeping deluge of sorrow is an augering of mankind's ultimate end. The citizens of the world strain to crack a smile as the clock ticks away to a cataclysmic final curtain.
MONA LISA IS SAD is a solemn and quietly compelling meditation on mankind's ecological, societal, and spiritual problemata from the director of the 1972 miniclassic THE TELEPHONE BOX. Comparatively, this one's a lesser effort, but the core concept is so admirably outside-the-box that it can't be wholly dismissed. The paranormal mystery at hand is alluring and incisively imagined, but it precipitates circumstances which are limned in a rather vague and extemporary manner. Newspaper headlines and TV broadcasts are the primary expository means of illustrating a developing global crisis, one which culminates in a non-specified extinction event. The apocalypse is visualized as a concurrence of natural disasters, chiefly excogitated through stock film snippets of erupting volcanoes, intercut with shaky shots of crumbling drywall and miniature cars being tossed about. It's not very effective, but noting the production's budgetary constraint, it is forgivable.
All things considered, it's a better film in concept than composition, with a narrative that may have been more sharply defined at feature length. At forty-odd minutes, it feels a bit shoehorned and summarized...but efficiently so.
6/10.
MONA LISA IS SAD is a solemn and quietly compelling meditation on mankind's ecological, societal, and spiritual problemata from the director of the 1972 miniclassic THE TELEPHONE BOX. Comparatively, this one's a lesser effort, but the core concept is so admirably outside-the-box that it can't be wholly dismissed. The paranormal mystery at hand is alluring and incisively imagined, but it precipitates circumstances which are limned in a rather vague and extemporary manner. Newspaper headlines and TV broadcasts are the primary expository means of illustrating a developing global crisis, one which culminates in a non-specified extinction event. The apocalypse is visualized as a concurrence of natural disasters, chiefly excogitated through stock film snippets of erupting volcanoes, intercut with shaky shots of crumbling drywall and miniature cars being tossed about. It's not very effective, but noting the production's budgetary constraint, it is forgivable.
All things considered, it's a better film in concept than composition, with a narrative that may have been more sharply defined at feature length. At forty-odd minutes, it feels a bit shoehorned and summarized...but efficiently so.
6/10.
