“Fay Grim” (2007)
Picking up seven years after the events of “Henry Fool” (and shot nine years later, after Hartley had exiled himself to Europe), the unexpected and surprising sequel (Hartley’s first), in retrospect, when watched back to back with its forbear, is rather brilliantly spun-off in the new direction of espionage. Nothing prepares Fay (Parker Posey), Simon (James Urbaniak) or us the audience, for that matter, for the film’s central conceit: Henry’s memoir “confessions” — revealed to be unintelligible and unpublishable blather at the end of “Henry Fool”– are apparently a brilliant secret code for clandestine information that could compromise the security of the U.S. CIA agents (Jeff Goldblum and Leo Fitzpatrick) attempt to coerce Fay, Henry’s wife who is now a fugitive from the law, into turning over the notebooks that she doesn’t actually possess. A single mother in Queens (her brother Simon rots in jail for helping Henry flee the U.S. in the first film), Fay’s determined to raise her 14-year-old son to be the exact opposite of her lousy husband. But soon, Fay’s dispatched to Paris to find Henry, where she quickly becomes embroiled in an international espionage intrigue involving several nations vying for the same intel. Shot with dutch angles aplenty and employing Hartley’s increasingly alienating scores (this time a form of pretentious/experimental orchestral timpani and wandering flutes), while cleverly conceived, the conspicuous style eventually gets in the way of what should be an off-kilter spy story. But it’s certainly a first for the director and Goldblum and Parker take to his distinctive deadpan style like ducks to water, so in the scheme of things it is a semi-return to form and probably Hartley’s best film since “Henry Fool.” [B-]
“Possible Films” and more.
On top of his many features, Hal Hartley also directed many shorts over the years, exactly seventeen of them, in fact, and eight are included on the “Possible Films – Short Works by Hal Hartley 1994-2004” DVD. Curiously not included is “Flirt” (1993) the short film that marked his first collaboration with Parker Posey and made way for “Flirt” the feature-length effort in 1996 (also with Posey and the same cast playing the same characters). While many of them are shot on what looks like lo-fi VHS-quality video and aren’t exactly memorable, “Opera No. 1” is worth mentioning as it’s Hartley’s first and only musical, an ambitious mini-opera that he wrote starring Posey and Adrienne Shelly. “The Sisters of Mercy” also stars Posey and is a playful experimental riff on the 1994 short “Iris,” starring the same cast and featuring lyrics and music from The Breeders‘ “Iris,” co-starring Sabrina Lloyd who would go on to star in the “The Girl from Monday.” But perhaps the most interesting of the bunch is “Regarding Soon,” a first-person interview documentary with Hartley about his 1998 stageplay, “Soon.” A serio-comic drama dealing with the confrontation at Waco, Texas, between the religious community (the Branch Davidians) and the U.S. federal government, it is an important entry in his oeuvre, if only for how once again Hartley shows himself preoccupied with themes like the nature of religious truth, upcoming apocalypses, and the comedic end-is-nigh alarmism that generally comes when examining the the joys, sorrows, and disasters of “creative religiosity.”
For all Hartley has been neglected or outright ignored by large swathes of the moviegoing public, his is the kind of career that inspires the initiated few to often deep devotion. And this also seems true of his actors, many of whom return to feature in his films time and again, forming almost a theatrical troupe around him, willing to go where he leads. One such actor, Liam Aiken who played the young son Ned in both “Henry Fool” and “Fay Grim,” said to us when we spoke with him in Berlin recently: “Hal is such a gentle and kind soul and it’s such an interesting juxtaposition for the movies he makes, full of the most rough and brutish characters you can imagine.” And to a certain extent, perhaps that speaks to his continuing appeal for the Hartleyites among us: in his best work undercurrents of violence war with trust and thoughtfulness; kitschy characters on the make ponder deeply philosophical dilemmas; and some of the most profound human insights are delivered in staccato bursts of, well, nonsense. It’s contradictory, confounding and it doesn’t always work. What’s not to love?
— Rodrigo Perez, Brandon Harris, Sam Chater, Oliver Lyttelton, Jessica Kiang