Up and coming writer Roman (James Hicks) is struggling to come up with the goods for his serious social drama based upon the high flying independent career woman. In London's Financial District, known as The City, he can find his answers, in search for his real life Marianne for his screenplay "Miss Monday", he goes undercover, and with borrowed suit and briefcase, he takes on the role of a City employee, scouting, listening and investigating for that all-important breakthrough.
What he finds is something more incomprehensible, more bizarre and intriguing. While gaining access to Miss Mondays, aka Gloria, home, researching then takes on a completely new perspective, caught in the middle of his meddling for background information, unexpectedly, she returns home early, Roman is trapped. He hides. He observes. He learns.
This is where Miss Mondays second act starts to take a different role from lighthearted humour to dark sided concern, a woman with potential, with ambition and vision. That is what we are led to believe from this busy modern independent woman, from the external persona she gives us. There is more afoot here than Roman could have possibly imagined, a woman, a frustrated woman, a martyred woman, a cheated woman and an overlooked woman in both her career and life, this is the real world that Roman's Miss Monday exists, an unhappy woman.
Haunted by her own personal Bogeyman, and hidden demons, Gloria and her private and personal secrets, unbeknown to her, are slowly unravelled before our eyes. Her angst and desperation of coming to terms with her childhood, her career, her age and her life is beautifully dealt with, with great pains, this woman is more than a little perplexed and lost, like the ghosts of her past, they have come back to haunt her.
Done with tenderness and soft pummelling that gives us a view of human torment and how when one stumbles across it can inevitably change our outlook on how we should see others and not judge them so quickly. Roman has learnt this valuable lesson well, too well. Can he ever look anyone in the eye again and say he knows them proper? Has this shocking experience opened his eyes and given him vision that goes beyond ignorance and prejudice?
The style of movie making here, as with writing and production, is done Toronto born Benson Lee no harm whatsoever, winner of the Special Jury Prize of the 1998 Sundance Film Festival for the acting abilities for Andrea Hart and nominated by the Grand Jury Prize for Benson Lee too. St. Louis International Film Festival during 1998 gave this imaginative director the Emerging Filmmaker Award and too nominated by the Independent Spirit Awards for Andrea Hart's Best Debut Performance. With interesting editing by Tula Goenka, Emily Gumpel and Robert Tate and with the use of its music, both classical and original, Miss Monday is as highly independent in its concept as it is in its delivery of this personal and tragic saga.
Poor Roman may have writers block but Miss Monday is a highly imaginative and entertaining made movie, it really is a shame that it has not, as it should rightfully be, more appreciated to a wider audience, both for its originality and for its understanding of the complex and fragile human psyche.
