MARK TAGGART

A little over ten years ago, watching the latest film by Hal Hartley was always a pleasure worth looking forward to. It also inevitably lead to re-watching his back catalog: the gems Simple Men, Trust, Amateur, and The Unbelievable Truth.

Upon first viewing, his films would appear to be staged in the typically flippant “indie” style favored by us Gen-Xers, in which irony was the universal affectation applied to all plots, characters, and themes. But after adjusting to the oddly intense delivery of the actors’ lines, and the pronounced detachment of the characters from the events they wandered through and into, I started to see something unusual. Hartley’s conceits split his stories away from cliches that typically surrounded them: character typing, sentimental emotional responses, canned pacing, and (most importantly) predictable outcomes. The end result was a kind of hyper-reality– by having the expected cues yanked away without completely deconstructing (booga booga) the narrative, Hartley allowed the viewer to experience his tales with fresher eyes, and come away with impressions that were far more distinctive than those served up in typical fictions.

(BTW, his films were also some of the first places to see standout performances by Martin Donovan, Parker Posey, James Urbaniak, Adrienne Shelly, and many other terrific talents)

For me, the best of these was the ambitious Henry Fool, named for its unforgettable “protagonist,” who exists in the tale as both a parody and a reimagining of the outlaw literary hero:

Its style was standard Hal Hartley: spare, unadorned, punctuated with occasional bursts of action, but primarily driven by the intersecting foibles of its component parts. It even reached into political ideas without feeling either dismissive or didactic. But most importantly (at least to me), Henry Fool delivered a particularly human story, one which plugged the viewer into the lives of its characters in a direct and meaningful way.

And then… not silence, but suddenly remarkably few people were talking about Hal Hartley anymore. His films never seemed to make it to the Art-House venues, instead trickling out on DVD at select locations. I know I wasn’t the only one wondering “what happened to Hal Hartley?” To be fair, he did produce a couple duds in the intervening years, so perhaps it was just standard audience drift. I’m personally inclined to believe exponential increases in movie production costs (and therefore, increased demands by movie financiers for monetary returns) crowded out smaller films of the variety Hartley specializes in.

It was therefore a great pleasure to watch his latest film last night, the “sequel” to Henry Fool, Fay Grim. In the spirit of both, a confession: I went into this one thinking (out loud), “I hope this one doesn’t suck.” It doesn’t, and it doesn’t simply re-hash either the story or the style of Henry Fool, either. It adopts a very Godard-like approach to the borrowing/spoofing of a film genre, in this case the international espionage thriller; just as Godard exploded the caper genre with absurd cops-and-robbers chase scenes, so Hartley scrambles the spy flick with monologues detailing impossibly convoluted conspiracies within conspiracies. As the spy game descends into the ridiculous, it even swirls around that greatest Post-Modern Macguffin: the authorless book that rewrites real-life events as it continues to rewrite itself.

As in my favorite Hartley films, the unraveling is not pointless– it leads to very intense deliberations regarding real-world problems, in this case the demands placed upon the individual in the post-9/11 world. It’s a remarkable (almost impossible) chain of elements Hartley strings together to take us from Henry Fool’s basement apartment to an international crisis on the streets of Istanbul, but one worth watching him hammer together.

Why didn’t this one make the papers? Critical opinions aside, I”m guessing that the decision to include a sympathetic portrayal of a radical Mujahideen leader as a major character, as well as a keystone-cops-style portrayal of U.S. Intelligence agents (as opposed to say, the mega-cool Machiavellian murder machines of the Bourne films), didn’t make for easy marketing. But watch it yourself & see what you think.

I”m a bit late to the party on this one, but better late than never: Paul Madonna”s All Over Coffee. Calling it a “comic strip” doesn’t accurately describe it, but it is a weekly feature worth checking out, and even subscribing to (use your favorite RSS tool). It”s one of those wonderful works that uses the gaps between its elements (in this case, urban landscape images and written text) to suggest even more than it describes; the spaces in between offer many points for readers to enter, too.

The ink-and-wash format looks good on the Web, but it looks fantastic in print. I’ve been reading the archived works in a hardbound edition from City Lights (available at my public library)– an excellent presentation of this unique body of work.