Hal Hartley Films | Hal Hartley Filmography | Hal Hartley Biography | Hal Hartley Career | Hal Hartley Awards

Well known in Europe, but more of a cult favorite than a box-office draw in his native United States, Hal Hartley has been held in high critical esteem for his quirky feature films and shorts and, incidentally, for putting Long Island on the map of famed cinematic locales. Writing his own screenplays, punctuating the dramas with his own sparse music, and working regularly with the same actors and technicians, Hartley is a model of the resolutely independent film artist.

Hartley's screenplays are among the most distinctive features of his cinema. Reminiscent of both David Mamet (perhaps the film House of Games as well as certain plays) and Harold Pinter (chiefly the period of The Homecoming), Hartley's dialogue tends toward the laconic and the absurd: occasionally downright hilarious and almost always droll, especially when spoken by mostly humorless characters. Of the actors whom Hartley has used a number of times, Martin Donovan is supreme in his deadpan delivery of lines, with exactly the right amount of dry irony, anger, or cluelessness, as the moment calls for.

Of cinematic influences, Jean-Luc Godard has constantly been singled out. Occasionally Hartley appears to be doing a conscious homage, as in the sudden burst into dance in Surviving Desire, a nod to Bande ? part (Band of Outsiders)?but a dance scene in Simple Men, similarly unexpected but more elaborately choreographed and integrated into the story world, seems altogether original. The stylization of violence in Amateur also recalls Godard, though the shoving matches of most of the earlier films seem pure Hartley. Perhaps more subtly Godardian, Weekend vintage, are the vacant landscapes of ?Long Island? (actually Texas, for the most part) in Simple Men, where characters more or less stumble through their peculiar lives.

The Unbelievable Truth already has Hartley's unmistakable style and tone. With a plot suited for either soap opera or film noir in its melodrama and romantic entanglements?an ex-con returns to the town where he caused the deaths of two people, and where he is shunned by most but loved by a rebellious young woman?the film is instead a black comedy with a bent toward real romance, all centered around the question of trusting people enough to accept their versions of ?the true story.? Hartley's hometown of Lindenhurst, a rather ramshackle-looking small town half metamorphosed into a commuter suburb, seems the perfect pale backdrop for his oddball characters.

Trust superficially resembles The Unbelievable Truth, with Adrienne Shelley again as a rebellious youth and Lindenhurst as locus of American family dysfunction. It also has much of the same droll comedy as The Unbelievable Truth, yet a considerably darker tone overall, with its brutal parents, severely asocial hero (Martin Donovan), and unexpected violence?as in the liquor store clerk's attack upon the Shelley character. In its confident handling of mixed moods it may be Hartley's most impressive feature to date.

Simple Men, set on a more rural Long Island after a brief stop in Lindenhurst, has a wilder plot and if anything more outrageous comedy, as two sons?a criminal and a college student?follow clues in search of their long-missing father, a reputed terrorist bomber. The cynical Bill, who notes that ?you don't need an ideology to knock over a liquor store,? has been betrayed in love, and so is determined to seduce women by appearing to be ?mysterious, thoughtful, deep, but modest? and then ?throw them away.? Of course he falls for a woman who claims to find him all of those things (she manages to use all four adjectives in a short conversation), although the words seem to apply much more to her. The less-experienced Dennis falls for an eccentric Rumanian who turns out to be his father's new girlfriend. When he points out that his father is a womanizer?a married man who has also stood her up?she tells him he should be more respectful. Including two actors from The Unbelievable Truth who essentially reprise their roles as garage mechanic and assistant?and featuring a nun who answers a question about a medallion with, ?It's the Holy Blessed Virgin, you idiot,? before wrestling the man to the ground?Simple Men often crosses the border into farce, then withdraws to a dryer detachment. Again issues of truth and reliability are central, though this film is in addition more directly concerned with masculine values and behavior than any of the others. The story is almost always focused upon the two brothers and their attitudes toward their father, or their confusion about women; the women are rarely seen apart from men observing them; the talk is very often macho, though at one point the two couples and another would-be lover preposterously launch into a discourse about Madonna and modern women's "control over the exploitation of their own bodies."

Amateur, more or less commissioned by Isabel Huppert, who stars in it, is yet more melodramatic, featuring an amnesiac (Donovan again), evidently a sadistic criminal in his ?former life,? who is befriended by an ex-nun who wants to write pornography (Huppert)?the pair of them having to flee various crazed and criminal types. Here the themes of trust and the knowability of a mysterious person's past are developed through the most lurid situations. Flirt is also concerned with issues of love and betrayal, but is also an experiment in structure: Hartley's fifth feature is actually a trilogy of short films, each using some of the same dialogue and following the same dramatic trajectory, but with different settings (New York-Berlin-Tokyo) and gender relations (according to whether the flirt is straight or gay, male or female).

All of Hartley's films call attention to their own artifice through the stylized dialogue and the actors' deliveries of it, and through the eccentric plots. Flirt moves to a new level of self-reflexivity in that the director plays a character named ?Hal? who carries around a can of a film called ?Flirt.? It will be interesting to see how Hartley continues to balance artifice and dramatic passions, cool wit and melodrama, in films to come.?JOSEPH MILICIA