Two Fables by Hal Hartley

PJ Harvey and Martin Donovan in The Book of Life

 

Tatiana Abracos in The Girl From Monday

The Book of Life (Hal Hartley, 1998)

Cast: Martin Donovan, PJ Harvey, Dave Simonds, Thomas Jay Ryan, Miho Nikaido, D.J. Mendel, Katreen Hardt, James Urbaniak. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Jim Denault. Art direction: Andy Biscontini. Film editing: Steve Hamilton. 

The Girl From Monday (Hal Hartley, 2005)

Cast: Bill Sage, Sabrina Lloyd, Tatiana Abracos, Leo Fitzpatrick, D.J. Mendel, James Urbaniak, Juliana Francis, Gary Wllmes, Edie Falco. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Sarah Cawley. Production design: Inbal Weinberg. Film editing: Steve Hamilton. Music: Hal Hartley. 

As the millennium approached -- remember the Y2K jitters? -- two producers from the French company Haut et Court teamed with a European TV network and asked filmmakers from around the world to make hourlong movies that would reflect their visions of the imminent future. Hal Hartley, fresh off the success of Henry Fool (1997), was the American director chosen, and The Book of Life was his response. It's a fable about the Second Coming: Jesus (Martin Donovan) arrives in New York City, tasked by God to fulfill the prophecies about the end of the world recounted in the book of Revelation. He is accompanied by Mary Magdalene (PJ Harvey). Jesus likes New York and its people so much that after retrieving the Book of Life (an Apple Powerbook) from a storage locker (No. 666) and breaking the fifth of the seven seals he calls the whole thing off. Apocalypse? Nah. His decision is hotly protested by attorneys from the firm of Armageddon, Armageddon, and Jehoshaphat. God, Jesus observes, is all about the Law, so lawyers are his favorites. Jesus is somewhat aided by Satan (Thomas Jay Ryan) who wants the world to continue so he has somewhere to meddle. The film's brevity is its chief virtue: Too much more and the wit would have cloyed -- as it sometimes does -- into whimsy. The humanistic outlook of the film seems to have stuck with Hartley into his next movie, The Girl From Monday, a venture into science fiction that doesn't quite work. In the future, the United States has become a conglomerate, and people are traded on the stock exchange. (The more sex they have, for example, the higher their value.) Bill Sage plays Jack, an advertising executive who is secretly a member of the resistance to this new order, but he's so disillusioned that he drives to the seashore where he plans to kill himself. Instead, he just passes out after taking pills, and awakes to see a woman (Tatiana Abracos) emerge from the sea. She's an alien from a planet where people are part of an incorporate whole, and when he asks her name she says "No Body." Jack takes her home with him and teaches her how to perform simple physical tasks like drinking and eating. He also learns that she's there to bring back with her a fellow being from her planet (known on Earth as Monday after its discoverer) who came to Earth years ago. The problem with The Girl From Monday is that the satire on consumerism doesn't mesh well with the sci-fi premise. The film is a muddle of ideas, many of which are half-baked. Hartley's inspiration is said to have been Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965), but Godard's movie has a coherence and dry wit The Girl From Monday lacks.   

Flirt (Hal Hartley, 1995)

Bill Sage and Martin Donovan in Flirt

Cast: Bill Sage, Dwight Ewell, Miho Nikaido, Robert John Burke, Martin Donovan, Erica Gimpel, Michael Imperioli, Holt MckCallany, Harold Perrineau, Parker Posey, Karen Sillas, Sebastian Koch, Geno Lechner, Elina Löwensohn, Hal Hartley. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Michael Spiller. Production design: Steve Rosenzweig. Film editing: Steve Hamilton. Music: Hal Hartley, Jeffrey Taylor.

Every experiment is valuable, even (maybe especially) the failed ones. Thomas Edison went through any number of potential filaments for his electric light bulb before finding the one that would provide sustained illumination, but he learned something from each attempt to work with cardboard or hemp or bamboo. So to dismiss Hal Hartley's Flirt as a failed experiment, as some have done, is to miss the point. Hartley is trying to show the primacy of context, to demonstrate that where and by whom something is said and done matters even in the most mundane of instances: a relationship on the verge of ending, for example. Flirt has a precursor in a scene in Hartley's 1992 film Surviving Desire, in which a young writer reads to her professor a passage from a story she's writing. The first time she reads it, the speaker in her story is a man talking about his relationship with a woman. The professor then asks her to read it again, but to change the speaker to a woman talking about her relationship with a man. The change is revelatory. In Flirt, Hartley tries a similar experiment but on a larger scale, not only sexual but cultural. He does the same scene, a couple at a crucial moment in their relationship, with the same dialogue, and with the same follow-up scenes -- an encounter at a public phone, the introduction and firing of a gun, a session in an emergency room, and an attempt by one partner to contact the other -- but he does it first with a straight white man in New York, then with a gay Black man in Berlin, and finally with a Japanese woman in Tokyo as the central character. The results are sometimes predictable: A gun brandished in New York is bound to elicit a different reaction from one brandished in Tokyo. In New York, no one seems to take much notice, so there's a scene in which the protagonist and the gun owner sit at a table in a bar and talk while one takes the bullets out of the gun and the other puts them back in again. But passersby in Tokyo are terrified at the site of the weapon and the police are called, precipitating a kind of chase. In the relationship of protagonist and lover, the changes in sexual identity have more inward results, exposing different vulnerabilities in each partner. Flirt probably has to be called a failed experiment because nothing like sustained illumination is achieved. But experiments are also often contaminated by the observer, so we have to take into account that the observer is Hartley, a filmmaker who has a distinct and familiar way of looking at things. 

Amateur (Hal Hartley, 1994)

Martin Donovan and Elina Löwensohn in Amateur

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Martin Donovan, Elina Löwensohn, Damian Young, Chuck Montgomery, Dave Simonds. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Michael Spiller. Production design: Steve Rosenzweig. Film editing: Steve Hamilton. Music: Hal Hartley, Jeffrey Taylor.

The protagonists of Hal Hartley's movies invariably have a secret past. The problem with Thomas (Martin Donovan) is that he isn't in on the secret. When we first see him he is lying on the cobblestones of an alley in New York City. Is he dead? That's the conclusion reached by the young woman who peers into the alley and cautiously approaches the body, extends a foot to prod it, and then inspects more closely. Then she disappears. She is Sofia Ludens (Elina Löwensohn), a porn star who thinks she has killed Thomas. After she's gone, he will awake with a start, pick himself up, and stagger out into the streets and into a cafe, where he meets Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), a former nun who writes pornographic stories for a living. He tells her he doesn't know who he is, that his past and even his name is a complete blank. So they set out together to solve the puzzle. And so goes the setup for Hartley's excursion into the tropes (not to say clichés) of the crime thriller. In addition to amnesia, there's also an international conspiracy of some sort, and even a MacGuffin: some floppy disks (which we are twice reminded, as we were so frequently in the early 1990s when they were a thing, are neither floppy nor disks) that contain shocking secrets. Thomas and Isabelle will team up with Sofia -- reluctantly on her part, since she was the one who had reason to try to kill him -- and go on the run from some hit men working for a crime boss who used to be Thomas's employer. Played straight, the story might be entertaining enough, but of course Hartley never plays anything straight. The performances are good, given that everyone has to work in Hartley's deadpan mode. Huppert slips with apparent ease into the punch-drunk milieu of his films, but she has already proved that she can play almost anything. The supporting cast is filled out with some now-familiar faces like Michael Imperioli, Parker Posey, and Tim Blake Nelson in bit parts. Amateur never transcends spoofery into significance, but why ask for that anyway?

Surviving Desire (Hal Hartley, 1992)

Martin Donovan and Mary B. Ward in Surviving Desire

Cast: Martin Donovan, Mary B. Ward, Matt Malloy, Rebecca Nelson, Julie Kessler. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Michael Spiller. Production design: Steve Rosenzweig. Film editing: Hal Hartley. Music: The Great Outdoors, Hal Hartley.

There's a brilliant moment in the middle of Hal Hartley's short film Surviving Desire when Sofie (Mary B. Ward). who is on the cusp of an affair with her professor, Jude (Martin Donovan), reads to him from a story she's been writing. It recounts the thoughts of a man articulating his feelings about the relationship he is in with a woman. When she finishes, Jude asks her to read it again, but to change the voice in the story from a man's to a woman's. When she does, the effect of the same words, with only the pronouns changed from "he" to "she," is subtly and poignantly different. Unfortunately, any insight the change might have made in the relationship between Jude and Sofie doesn't persist. This little film, just under an hour, is a case study in postmodernism and its sometimes paralyzing irony. I can imagine D.H. Lawrence, for example, might run screaming from the room if he could have been shown Surviving Desire. It's an object lesson in what he most disliked about modern life: the disjunction from the instinctual and the immediate -- what he referred to as "sex in the head." Henry James might have marveled at the exquisite self-consciousness of Hartley's characters, and E.M. Forster, who chose as epigraph for Howards End the phrase "only connect," would have nodded in sorrow at the failed connections in the film. But I think the presiding influence on Hartley's movie is Jean-Luc Godard, whose men and women talk their way through relationships just as Jude and Sofie do, but who are also capable of bursting into moments of irrational play, like the dance number Jude segues into after falling in love with Sofie. It's a steal from the Madison scene in Godard's Bande à Part (1964). Hartley's movie is a bittersweet comedy. It opens with Jude reading from The Brothers Karamazov, trying to get his students to comprehend Dostoevsky. They don't: Someone literally throws the book at him and others walk out. We come to realize that perhaps Jude doesn't comprehend Dostoevsky either: When he recounts the writer's tortured life to the class, it's easy to see that Jude has never experienced anything of that order, that the intellectual content of the novel eclipses for him the emotional content that comes from Dostoevsky's life. The film ends with Sofie, working in a bookstore, repeating the works "Can I help anyone?" to the customers who mill around her, her tone of voice suggesting that she hopes no one will answer. Hartley's characters are beyond help, stuck in their own minds. A bartender in the movie says that "Americans ... want a tragedy with a happy ending." What Hartley gives them is a comedy with an ending that's neither tragic nor comic but rather that special postmodern blend of both.

Trust (Hal Hartley, 1990)

Adrienne Shelly and Martin Donovan in Trust

Cast: Adrienne Shelly, Martin Donovan, Rebecca Nelson, John MacKay, Edie Falco, Karen Sillas, Matt Malloy, Suzanne Costollos, Jeff Howard, Tom Thon. Screeplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Michael Spiller. Production design: Daniel Ouellette. Film editing: Nick Gomez. Music: The Great Outdoors, Philip Reed. 

Hal Hartley's second feature begins like his first, with a teenage girl played by Adrienne Shelly having a fight with her father and storming out. But unlike The Unbelievable Truth (1989), this time the girl is pregnant and, the moment she leaves, the father drops dead. As Tolstoy informed us, each unhappy family is different from the others. And as if to prove that point, on the other side of town a thirtyish man (Martin Donovan) is fighting with his father (John MacKay), but this time the father doesn't drop dead, he makes his son go clean the bathroom. Again. (It's the most spotless bathroom I've ever seen.) And the son, whose name is Matthew Slaughter, doesn't storm out then, instead he goes to work, fights with his boss, and quits his job. Eventually, the girl, whose name is Maria Coughlin, and the man have to meet and have to work out the problematic attraction that develops between them. If that reminds you of The Unbelievable Truth, in which a teenage girl and an older man fall in love, I should add that Matthew Slaughter, like Joshua Hutton in the earlier film, has a shadowed past: He hasn't been to prison like Joshua but we learn that he has a record and spent time in reform school. He's also so volatile that he carries around with him a hand grenade. (We might call it a Chekhov's grenade.) The similarities between Hartley's first two films extend to the deadpan performances and eccentric twists on conventional situations, which troubled some critics: Roger Ebert, for example, referred to the "soap opera idiom" of the story and "the arbitrary nature of his plots," but couldn't quite see where Hartley was going with the film. I wasn't sure where Hartley was going either, but I was happy to accompany him on the trip. In the second film he seemed to have learned more about making a movie: The performances are more consistently good, the pacing is more steady, and his unique voice and vision more securely articulated.