Le dossier Mona Lina

The story and cast are good but it doesn't exactly move at a blistering pace. Not in the same league as Caliphate but still entertaining enough and builds up to a decent if twisted end

Mossad agent Neta Riskin is sent to a Hamburg safe house to babysit Golshifteh Farahani. Fahahani is the former lover of a Hezbollah leader. She has been selling information to Israel for years. Now, however, she is pausing on a flight to Canada, while her plastic surgery heals, rendering her unrecognizable; as Miss Riskin's boss says, "We take care of our own." Yet as the two women wrangle, then ultimately bond, Miss Riskin begins to wonder who decides who "our own" is.

The, dreary world of grotty safe houses and betrayals that spy movies became after the 1960s "too cool for school" school triggered by the James Bond movies was a necessary corrective. Inevitably it got tangled up with the anti-government school of thought, leaving us with yet another subgenre that still needs its own corrections. This movie, well acted though it is, is shot in dreary light and despite good acting, seems to be more a matter of gender equality than seeking to tell a different story.

Can't blame the actors for bad dialogue, storytelling, and directing. Could have been an intriguing story if done better and with out pandering to every itemized political agenda and stereotyping of "world-woke" filmmakers

The film opens with a quotation from Kahlil Gibran. "Life is an island, rocks are its desires, trees its dreams, and flowers its loneliness, and it is in the middle of an ocean of solitude and seclusion." I'm not sure whether that's the exact translation used in the movie. Anyway, the movie shows us two women secluded in a lonely apartment for a good cinematic reason-- one is an agent assigned to keep the other one safe from the bad guys-- while each of them is intent on not only on surviving but on the goal of pursuing a purposeful parental relationship-- nurturing an island of life-- in the face of the ocean of nihilism symbolized by the betrayals and assassinations accompanying international espionage and terrorism.

Writer/director Eran Riklis compares the film to Bergman's Persona because of the intimacy and tension of the relationship between the two women, but I think a closer comparison might be with Coppola's The Rain People, where a woman unsure of herself as a future mother picks up a hitchhiker and finds herself receiving practice in the task of caring for another person.

When the movie ended, a woman in the theater asked me to take one side or the other in a debate with her friend over what actually had happened during the final minutes. The audience is indeed left with some bits to figure out, but I didn't feel seriously cheated. The production was professional, suspense was maintained continuously, and the music-- even if composer Yehonatan Riklis is, one might guess, some kind of relative of the director-- makes a fine, tasteful, enhancement.

I really tried to give this a good go but it's so badly produced, badly edited and combined with wooden acting, the film really had nothing going for it at all. It's like a film project that one might do for drama school. There was no compelling reason to continue to waste time watching it.