Grégoire Renaud R. Mondo is perhaps best known not for his films, but for everything surrounding them. The fanfare that accompanies these works of cinematic marvel often sits in the same (or in rare cases, higher) regard as the film itself. Much more than mere marketing stunts, Mondo alters our reality to conform with that of his films (the majority of which fall in the magical realism genre), so that when we eventually see them, there is a sense of familiarity and continuance with the images presented on screen.
His films are all masterpieces in their own regard, with Mortis being preserved in the Library of Congress, and Alias: Conrad (not to be confused with Sir Ridley Scott’s 2017 sci-fi flick Alien: Covenant) receiving a 1 hour standing ovation at Cannes. However, the worlds he constructs in the lead-up to each seminal masterwork are inseparable from the overall film experience. I do hate this phrase, but you really had to be there. Stunts like the dead roaming the streets of Paris and quoting the poetic works of Victor Hugo at passersby in order to ‘mentally prepare audiences for Mortis’1, spoke volumes about the film before a single second was made public and, upon completion of the film, frame the protagonist’s struggle in a whole new light.
His most recent project, Visionary, continues this trend. Who can forget the articles written about how he had sworn off film-making after supposedly abandoning this very project, how it had got crew members injured and led to the suicide of the scriptwriter? Fictitious, of course, but this is only apparent in retrospect. The scriptwriter, Raphael Lawrence, was a clever nom de plume of Mondo himself. Who else could conjure such a genius narrative?2 The injured crewmembers, all makeup artists, merely took a day painting on wounds and bruises after principle photography had concluded3. In fact, Mondo shared a picture of him with a chunk of his forearm supposedly missing to assuage doubt4.
This was all in the wake of a very public and messy divorce with actress Linda Maria, who had starred in every one of Mondo’s previous films. Their parting came as a shock to the public: they seemed the very picture of domestic bliss, at least according to their GQ interviews.
The divorce has been directly cited as the impetus for the film[citation needed], much as Mondo and Maria’s marriage was the genesis of La Malattia e la Morte, e…, which won not only best picture, but also won Maria her first best actress award for her role as Maria Mondo. Maria Mondo is the terminally ill wife of Mondo’s character (Mondo is known to star in his own films, you see), Malcolm Renaud.
Visionary must therefore be viewed through the lens of La Malattia, not only in direct dialogue but also in how it refuses such. Take the opening shot of each film. La Malattia starts on thin white sheets that obscure the silhouette of Maria, lingering for 2 minutes as Maria and Malcolm exchange greetings. Visionary, however, begins with crumbling black slate that quickly cuts to Linda Maria’s bare chest. The comparison, I hope, is obvious. Slate has been a recurring theme throughout Mondo’s works, most notably for its role as the titular Flint, Chalk, Slate where it serves to illustrate Mondo’s relationship with prehistory. And, in a more tangible sense, legacy. By crumbling it at the start of Visionary, Mondo invites us to disregard his previous work. This request should be ignored. Mondo cannot escape his past. Nor can he escape the feelings he still has for Maria.
Maria’s body is the subject of much of the film. Literally, in how her character is a world-famous erotic model, and metaphorically, in how so many shapes and stills echo her figure. Consider the various guitars and hourglasses that swallow and obscure the frame, or the leading, swooping curves of the rolling hills in Massif Central. These all seek to underline Mondo’s basal, sexual desire for his now ex wife.
Visionary follows Maria’s character through a non-linear, hard to parse narrative chronicling 4 important days in her life: The day she met her lover (the extent of their relationship is never made clear, but it at the very least sexual), the day her lover died, the day she was released from her modeling agency and a seemingly average day some time either before or after all of these events. Her character is never named, nor are any characters. There are no clues given in the film as to the chronology of these days, it is not even revealed if her love is the one that dies. There is, however, obvious continuity within the days, as recurring colour palettes, outfits and locations are central to understanding the puzzle of the film. The aforementioned hills of Massif Central compose the majority of her day spent lamenting the loss of her lover. This day in particular is one of two to be given a date, as the news is delivered via newspaper. It is then conveyed to the audience through one of the few utterances spoken in this day: “Mon chéri”. A fallen-over statue holding a now broken hourglass is the focus of the immediate next shot, obscuring Maria’s tears and illuminating the audience to what has happened. The puzzle deepens with the next scene. A lesser film-maker such as Nolan may have then provided explanatory footage of the chéri in question. Mondo instead opts to cut to that bland, random day, where Maria must live with the absence of the lover. This stroke of genius allows the scene to be framed three ways: Maria may have not met the lover yet, and thus their absence is anticipatory. This kind of absence is timeless, as there shall come a period after the loss of the lover in which Maria achieves this level of homeostasis. The second way to view this is that this is after the lover has perished, after she has gone on her trek in the hills of the French countryside and after she has sobbed silently to herself at sunrise. This is the quietitude we all hope to achieve after losing someone close, the ability to live without them and soldier on past their departure. As a victim of divorce myself, this scene resonated with me and my turbulent relationship with my ex-wife. The third way of viewing this scene, and the one largely accepted as correct, is that this is her during the relationship with her lover. This quotidian life, this banal, mundane, average day she lives out over the course of 8 scenes is the exact perfection that true love can bring. The expected. The beautiful.
Mondo doesn’t shy away from challenging his audience in Visionary. Uncomfortable scenes such as Maria’s 5 minute long tear-soaked masturbation near the end of the film are there, primarily, to spit in the face of La Malattia. La Malattia was far more conservative with its representations of intimacy. Surprising, in retrospect, given how liberally Mondo would go on to depict sexual acts such as the repeated cunnilingus in Alias: Conrad. This solo focus cannot be extricated from the actress herself, who had, by the time of filming, split from Mondo. The sensuality and timidness Mondo pours into each candid shot of Maria’s nudity harkens back to my previous comment on the allusions to it throughout the runtime. This is a film about Maria, but at the same time, the film is about Mondo. Mondo becomes Maria through his depiction of her, and even stated in interviews that he would wake from dreams fully convinced he were his ex wife5. This blurring of director and actress is the core of the film. Visionary therefore gains a new meaning: Mondo is not only a visionary in his filmic pursuits, but also able to envision himself as each and every one of his characters, his actors, and his audience.
In his 1979 book The Screen: What Separates Us From Art (?)6, Eugene M. Morrison outlines a critical theory of viewer separation and interpretation, to quote:
“As an audience, we are by nature separate from a work of art. This may appear lacklustre to a lesser critic than I, however this separation is crucial to understanding a given piece. This distance is crucial as it allows the piece to have an effect on us, allows it to echo through the passages and tunnels of our lives, reverberating through whatever we may go on to do afterwards. No one man can solve the universe he lives in. To try is mere folly, as we are all part of this universe and therefore unable to perceive it outside of ourselves, or beyond what we humans call logic. An outside observer, however, would have no problem being able to digest all the information of our universe as they are not limited by their own existence. They, by nature, are not part of their observed field, and are not beholden to its logic. They can use whatever reasoning and formulae that we cannot even conceptualise in order to solve our universe. Using this same framework, a man inside the vision-based horror of Stigma7 could not perceive his universe as flatly, as completely as we do. As viewers, however, we are able to comprehend the logic of the extraterrestrial threat and appreciate it as a metaphor for Gabrielle Serrano’s life as a homosexual woman in a catholic household.”
Mondo’s genius here is applying this property in reverse. Of course a character in a film could never appreciate what their life is a metaphor for. Mondo realises this about himself. He doesn’t know what’s happening in his life, he misses Linda dearly and wants to know why, what went wrong, and if he can ever move on. Mondo making Maria into a stand-in for himself places his own life in the hands of the audience to work out for him. The viewer is now sent on an unwilling, subconscious quest to help Mondo. It is raw, naked and vulnerable. Mondo’s pain over losing his love being refracted through that same lover abstracts it in a way that allows him to view himself objectively.
It is horrendously difficult to tackle the task of reconciling with yourself. Losing the most important person in your life, your dearest lover, impacts you in a way that is completely alien until you have experienced it. People often retreat from the world upon this loss, escaping into work or hobbies or interests, and that’s exactly what Mondo did. He hid from the world under fake names, made himself seem dangerous and insane for hurting crew and causing a death, going on a tour of interviews to disavow film-making as an art8. He was hurt. Scared. That loss had brought him to a new low from which he knew no respite, but for the films he had dedicated his life to studying creating.
Loss is a powerful motivator for Mondo. This traces back as far as his student films, with the unreleased Into Your Hands9 being made in the mourning of his father, about whom Mondo has spoken extensively as a source of guidance and strength in his youth10. Mondo of course has returned to dealing with loss through this film as, including the aforementioned, Mondo himself makes a few appearances in the film, almost in spite of himself.
The remaining love he has for his wife is apparent as, despite the obvious, he puts every ounce of his soul into his scenes. His acting subtle, minimalist: a blank slate. No, a mirror. Mondo invites the audience to reflect on themselves through him. Bearing the brunt of the pain alone, his emotional martyrdom is plain to see.
Seemingly divorced from the rest of the narrative, Mondo appears sporadically between segments. He often confronts the audience head-on, sat in a steel folding chair, wearing a blood-stained wedding suit (his own, mind you). He never says anything in these scenes, merely acting as a non-sequitur to the life of the unnamed protagonist. He, of course, is named.
“Je ne suis pas Grégoire. Je suis Mondo.”11
Obscuring himself from his given first name, Mondo appears as his work. He alone is Mondo, as Linda Maria changed her name back soon after the divorce. There is no other ‘Mondo’ left in this film apart from him, which has not been the case since Into Your Hands. Naturally, the audience is not to know the latter, however the clear distinction made here, alongside the inky black space behind him and the close-ups of his balled fists, amplifies his isolation. He misses Linda so, so much. He wishes she would talk to him. Or call him. Just once. Linda’s absence is felt in this scene, and all others containing Mondo, because he really wants us to empathise with him, and empathise I do. The pain I feel in my heart every time I gaze into his listless, unflinching eyes, mirroring my very soul as I’m forced to confront my own losses and the gaps they have left… It is a pain I hate him for, and a pain I am thankful for. That pain shows I cared, shows how deeply I was wounded when she left.
When she left and didn’t even call.
When she left and never really ended things.
When she left and had her brother take her stuff out of the house where the ghosts of children’s feet run screaming down the halls, where unspoken ‘I love you’s sputter and die in the bedrooms, where christmases and birthdays and weddings and funerals all fail to materialise. Where love had, truly, died.
The ending of the film is, naturally, bittersweet. It is the earliest we see in Maria’s life, evidenced by her mother clinging to life. Their house is destitute, barely even qualifying as such, given the lack of furniture and the absence of any warmth one might expect from a living space. Mother’s health is worsening, and the audience knows she is not long for the world given the placement of the scene. Maria leafs through a newspaper, several job listings are circled in red pen before she finds an erotic modelling gig. The start date is the 25th of July, 2026. The day Maria and Mondo finalised their divorce12. A final twist of the knife, as Mondo realises this is the moment his life fell apart, and Maria’s life finally began.
It is safe to say that Visionary is Mondo’s best work yet, both critically13 and commercially. And, most importantly, personally.
Thank you, Mondo.
For everything.
The second most popular review of Visionary is as follows:
What fumbling a 10/10 does to a mf (Rated 4.5 stars and hearted, appears in user’s top 4 films)
Footnotes (added posthumously):
1: Lewis, R., The Talking Head Hour ep. 29 ‘Mortis director’s fascination with ghosts’ 13.09.2008
2: Raphael Lawrence is actually the name of a small town jazz musician that Grégoire was a fan of in his youth. He passed a decade before Visionary was conceived of. This may be a strange tribute from the director.
3: Crew injuries had been reported as far back as pre-production, with the major report stemming from 40 days into the 80-day shoot. None of the injured were makeup artists (Source: Young, J. “The Most Dangerous Film of the 2020s”, The New York Times, 15 August 2024, p. 13)
4: The photo in question comes from a 2003 car crash shortly after Grégoire’s debut film Waiting for the Message, which left the fingers in his right arm paralysed. (Source: Williams, M. “Rookie Director Caught in Fender-bender After Cinematic Debut” South Carolina Bugle, 4 September 2003, p. 44)
5: Taken from Grégoire’s x.com (formerly twitter) account.
6: Morrison, E.M., (1994) The Screen: What Separates Us From Art?, 2nd Edition, Burning House Ltd.
7: Stigma was a 1953 horror film widely regarded for being the first screen portrayal of existential or cosmic horror. It has since been turned into a videogame, a stage play and loosely adapted into Grégoire’s Mortis.
8: There are too many examples to note, but Grégoire famously appeared on Conan on the 19th of February 2025 where he had a meltdown over film, storming offstage after O’Brien raved about how much he loved Mortis.
9: No version of Into Your Hands has ever been made public, and Grégoire only confirmed the existence of this film after this article was published.
10: “My Father, an Autopsy” Marseilles Post, January 2010 edition, p. 18
11: This is taken word for word (barring names) from Kenta Furusawa’s Hell Hath Fury (1972), wherein he addresses the audience in the same way following the death of his wife. At this time, he would be the only ‘Furusawa’ as both of his parents were dead, and his daughter had married professional wrestler Kazuma Ozawa. This statement is also more powerful in Japanese, as given names are often only used when someone is a close friend. Thus, Furusawa revokes companionship from the audience. When asked for comment, Grégoire called it an ‘homage’.
12: It is unclear where this date comes from. This film was released on the 6th of December 2025, and Linda Maria and Grégoire Renaud Rene Marceau (whom the article repeatedly mis-names as ‘Mondo’) have been happily married since the 30th of May 2006.
13: The film received middling reviews upon release (Source: IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic) and generally does not score above 3/5 on Letterboxd. A director’s cut, named Hand in Visionary, was released in July of this year. It is received much more favourably than Visionary, however it is still regarded as the weakest of Marceau’s films.
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