'Monday' Review: Sebastian Stan and Denise Gough give their all to sketchy roles
What a bummer. Starting off on a sexy, swooshing high, “Monday” stages a hook-up for its two hottie leads -- Sebastian Stan and Denise Gough -- on a summer weekend in Greece and then spoils all the fun by making them face up to responsibility on -- you guessed it -- Monday.
This kind of romantic adventure is hardly unique in Hollywood. Cinema master Richard Linklater did it best with “Before Sunrise” and two subsequent films starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Sadly, Greek director Argyris Papadimitropoulos, who covered similar turf to indelible effect in 2017’s “Suntan,” soon trips over his script’s rabid incoherence.
No reason to blame his two stars who give their all and then some to their sketchy roles. Stan, Marvel’s iconic Winter Soldier on film and TV, plays Mickey, an American expat who’s been living the hedonistic Greek dream for seven years, scraping by as a DJ. Gough, the Irish actress who blazed on stage in London and New York in “Angels in America,” sizzles as Chloe, an immigration lawyer eager to return home to Chicago after 18 months in Athens and a bitter breakup with an abusive boyfriend.
It’s a setup for a weekend romp complete with wild club dancing, coke-snorting and naked lovemaking on the beach before the cops intervene. Mickey is so into Chloe that he chases her to the airport and back into his arms.
In most Hollywood romcoms that would be the fade-out. But “Monday,” which Papadimitropoulos has called a "romcom gone wrong,” is hunting bigger game, a movie about what happens when erotic attraction gives way to the pressures of sustaining a real relationship. Mickey and Chloe aren’t carefree twentysomethings anymore. They’re a decade older and need to pay attention when obligations invade their funky Athens apartment.
Mickey and Chloe put off the inevitable over two years as their movie divides itself into sections, all of them labeled “Friday.” Papadimitropoulos and his British co-writer Rob Hayes have constructed the script as a springboard on which the actors can improvise. Occasionally, the device works, notably at a house party where Mickey and Chloe make the hilariously bad decision to invite their friends -- his and hers -- to meet, mix and mingle.
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Inexplicably, “Monday” then buries itself in banal backstories. Mickey has a 6-year-old son, Hector, from a relationship with a Greek beauty named Aspa (Elli Tringou) who's blocking this Peter Pan of a father from seeing Hector. So Mickey, a master of deflection, sends in Chloe to work her lawyer magic on Aspa and make everything good for her pampered manchild.
Disaster follows with Mickey glumly trying to figure out why he sabotaged his own career as a serious musician to write jingles and party hard. “I’m living with a teenager,” cries Chloe in frustration. Duh. In desperation, Mickey and Chloe try to recapture their initial spark by riding naked through Athens on a motorcycle. When the cold light of Monday finally dawns, that hardly seems the wisest decision. Or maybe the filmmakers wanted their “anti-romcom” to leave audiences rooting for its screwed-up lovebirds to break up. If so, mission accomplished.
