When George is first appointed as Simone’s chauffeur, the pair could pass for a squabbling screwball twosome of sorts. She is Black, elegant, and haughty; he is a bigoted white oaf. As in any screwball setup worth its salt, traditional gender roles are shaken like a cocktail. On a shopping trip, George is consigned to the passive “feminine” position while Simone picks out and pays for his clothes. Later, he tends to her hair, behaving more like a dresser than a driver. From their initial odd-couple antipathy emerges a fondness that is warming without ever quite feeling safe or snug—a mark of how deftly Jordan toys with our expectations but stops short of indulging them.

As Mona Lisa opens, George has just finished a seven-year prison stretch, which he served after refusing to rat on Mortwell. Clutching his brown paper bag of personal effects, he struts over Waterloo Bridge in the purple-streaked dawn. We don’t find out which prison he was in, though he is shown marching south across the Thames, so I like to think he was coming from HMP Pentonville, in a route that would have taken him directly past the door of the Scala.

Despite this proximity to Greene, Jordan has not encouraged his films to be read rigidly through the prism of Catholicism. Fastidiously structured and layered, Mona Lisa worships a different sort of Trinity—everything in the film, which itself contains a love triangle, comes in threes. George tries to restore his place in the three-member family he left behind, only for his estranged wife to forbid him from seeing their teenage daughter, Jeannie (Zoë Nathenson). A selection of thugs forms a sordid triumvirate: the nameless street-corner pimp (Perry Fenwick), the sleekly menacing Anderson (Clarke Peters), and Mortwell, the unholy father, at the top. Violence, too, obeys the rule of three. George enters Simone’s apartment block (Trinity Court, no less) on three occasions, with the razor-wielding Anderson bursting from the shadows during the final one. When George walks into the Royal Albion hotel in Brighton for the third time, we are primed to expect trouble. Sure enough, Mortwell is lying in wait, the white rabbit in his lap carrying the faintest echo of Blofeld’s cat.

Gazing out at the English Channel from Brighton Pier at the end of the film, George is all at sea. “I’ve sold myself for a couple of dykes,” he seethes, the scale of his misunderstanding humiliatingly clear, his choice of words suggesting how commodified he feels. Luxuriating in a sauna earlier, Mortwell joked about costly divorces; that gag, improvised by Caine, tallies with the transactional theme. Every contact here has its price in the marketplace. George bets all he has on Simone—she’s his big emotional investment, and he takes quite a hit when she withdraws her interest. Both she and Mortwell set him tasks and targets, but he discovers there isn’t much difference between these paymasters. “I’m just another fucking punter to you,” he rages at her.

Jordan was thirty-five when he made Mona Lisa. It announced him as a world-class director of actors—Hoskins won a prize at Cannes in 1986, and was nominated for an Oscar the following year—with a special aptitude when it came to newcomers. And it was the first of a clutch of his pictures to be named after songs: The Crying Game (1992), The Butcher Boy (1997), In Dreams (1999), Breakfast on Pluto (2005). (His 1982 debut, Angel, was released in the U.S. as Danny Boy, yet another song.) In Mona Lisa, Nat King Cole’s lush rendition of the title song dominates the soundtrack. It is heard over the opening credits, then on a car radio; George hums it, and it is incorporated into Michael Kamen’s score. Most important, though, the movie showcased the sensitivity to race, gender, and sexuality that Jordan would later bring to The Crying Game and Breakfast on Pluto, along with his skill at fusing pulp and poetry.

Mona Lisa is ultimately about chasms and disparities, the spaces where misunderstandings fester. Not least the one that exists between men and women: Thomas warns George that “women are different,” while George disabuses him of the notion that angels are female. No one quite calls George an angel, but Simone assures him that he is a “good man.” Perhaps it’s a yarn she spins to get what she wants. Everyone here is telling stories; Jordan’s characters exist in a limbo between the fictions they concoct and a reality too grim to face. Simone claims that her customers fall for who they think she is, but the film insists that we are all unknowable—just billions of individual Mona Lisas, each demanding honesty and openness from one another even as we guard our own enigmas.