The Monkey's Mask
Samantha Lang

Graham Barnfield

A flagship presentation at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, The Monkey's Mask plunges private detective Jill Fitzpatrick (Susie Porter) into a mesh-like mess of slayings, sex and poetry.

This uneven mixture gels well into a convincing and untidy case, mixing official decadence with fish-out-of-water comedy. However, the light moments cave in once a grim missing persons case becomes murder. This allows the excellent supporting cast to reveal exactly what's at stake, as a murdered teenager's parents crumble in the face of her apparently senseless killing. All this, coupled with the minor shock of finding out that she was feted for her performance of foul-mouthed, non-rhyming doggerel in front of a paying audience.

Ex-cop Fitzpatrick is clearly meant to be someone who never quite fits in with her surroundings. Her sexuality puts her at odds with her former police force colleagues; her philistinism means she's soon confronting the poetry reading scene she's meant to investigate. Despite this, before long she falls for Diana (Kelly McGillis), the victim's poetry lecturer and wife of a courtroom hot-shot. Evidence of the British Board of Film Classification's new maturity starts to seep through, as the erotic and explicit sex scenes are left uncut whilst the Showgirls school of lesbian representation is wisely avoided. The relationship is plausible and grows organically from the investigation, even if the vile husband (Marton Csokas) gets to lurk around in the background looking like a puffed-up version of Neighbours' Paul Ramsey.

So far so good: a striking Antipodean addition to the body of work we call neo-noir. However, not all is rosy in this particular garden. The pacing seems criminally slow in parts, with little to nourish the eye or ear for lengthy stretches. The choice of McGuffin, whilst appropriate for the digital video age, is something the audience can't use to guess 'whodunnit' as we're not given a level playing field to begin with. In short, The Monkey's Mask subverts the private eye genre sexually, but loses its way - and its ability to play fair - with what is expected of the crime/mystery genre.