Dev Patel’s excellent directorial debut
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Monkeyman, the stunning directorial debut of actor Dev Patel, is in theaters. Despite the uncontrollable brutality, the film turned out to be truly personal and touching.
Every night in a shabby fight club in the city of Yatana (which is as similar to Mumbai as Gotham is to New York), a nondescript man in an idiotic monkey mask (Dev Patel) enters the ring to receive a portion of the required teethings and some kind of fee. Nobody knows his name, so they just call him Guy. He never sleeps, because as soon as he falls asleep, nightmarish pictures from his childhood appear before his eyes. The dishonored mother dies there. My home is on fire there. There is evil and injustice going on there. And the Guy remembers, remembers very well, in great detail, who exactly is to blame for this. These are very bad and very influential people, it is almost impossible to reach them. Almost. So one fine evening the Guy takes off his mask and goes to buy a gun.
Dev Patel’s directorial debut was conceived almost 10 years ago and reached the audience not without difficulties. Problems were created first by the producers, then by Covid, filming was postponed and shifted, Patel received numerous Jackie Chan-type injuries on set, the film was supposed to be released immediately on streaming. Luckily, Monkeyman caught the eye of Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us, No), who bought it from Netflix for theatrical release. As a result, Monkeyman became a sensation at the important SXSW festival and won the Audience Award there, and in the first week of April it started in three thousand American cinemas from second place (the new series Omen, released at the same time, only reached fourth position).
Added to the commercial success was the unanimity of critics, with rare exceptions praising Monkeyman to the skies. And it seems that not a single review is complete without mentioning the John Wick films as the main source of Patel’s inspiration. Indeed, the tetralogy about a superkiller performed by Keanu Reeves became a turning point both for the genre and for the cultural space as a whole. It is no coincidence that when in one of the episodes a slum arms dealer praises the Guy for yet another menacingly sized gun, he mentions not Dirty Harry or the Terminator, but that “John Wick had the same gun.” Yes, his influence on Monkeyman is quite obvious. But, fortunately, the matter is not limited to one (even four) Wick. Patel demonstrates truly amazing observation, and most importantly, an understanding of how to use it. In two hours and one minute, an attentive and partial eye will repeatedly catch on the screen reflections of such pearls of oriental extreme as “Oldboy” by Park Chan-wook and “Only God Forgives” by Nicolas Winding Refn, “Ong Bak” by Prachya Pinkayu and “Merantau” by Gareth Edwards, the directorial debut of the aforementioned Wick-Reeves “Master of Tai Chi”, and if you follow the “Indian trail” itself, then not only everyone’s favorite Bollywood blockbusters like “Revolution Roars Nearby” by S.S. will inevitably come to mind. Rajamouli, but also not so obvious, but beautiful and furious “Haider” by Vishal Bharadwaj, or even director Bala’s masterpiece “I Am God”.
The list can be continued for a long time and with pleasure, but with all the thunderous abundance of references and allusions, there is a picture that is with “Munkyman” at some very deep level of kinship. This, of course, is In Search of Adventure, the celebration of naughtiness that Jean-Claude Van Damme staged for himself at the pinnacle of his Hollywood career in the mid-1990s: a self-directed film from his own script and starring himself. A literally mind-blowing fantasy in retro style, a kind of “The Adventures of Tintin at the Mortal Kombat tournament,” could raise any questions, but even the most inveterate skeptic could hardly doubt the purity of thoughts and disarming sincerity of the creator of all this luxury. The fact that Van Damme embodies the most cherished thoughts of the movie in which he dreamed of acting as a child, before becoming an actor, was so obvious that any claims faded into the background. Absolutely the same thing happens with Monkeyman. The only difference is that if Van Damme, who was 36 at the time of his directorial debut, focused primarily on the quite complacent dreams of primary and secondary school age (in particular, he did not deny himself the pleasure of riding an elephant in the frame), then Thirty-four-year-old Patel is clearly occupied by the fantasies and film tastes of an older teenager. This affected not only the level of cruelty and nudity (the romantic line, however, is brilliantly absent in both cases) and, as a consequence, the age rating, but also the general difference in mood. But when it comes to the most important thing, hidden and inexpressible in any other way except in a series of moving images, the films of Van Damme and Patel are similar, like twins separated at birth, who, in the best either Bollywood or Hong Kong traditions, will – definitely meet.
In theaters from April 11
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