In the middle of Hal Hartley's film Simple Men, an assemblage of wayward characters, all fugitive from or alien to society, start line dancing to the Sonic Youth song "Kool Thing." L.L.Cool J's and Kim Gordon's voices wrap around the solemn figures intent on their moves. A kind of holy foolery instantly invades the proceedings. What might have been ridiculous has become sublime, and the sublime is a finger stuck at the rest of the world. Fuck you, the pursed lips and swaying arms say, I can goddamn well line dance to whatever the hell I want to.
For me, this was a turning point in my appreciation of Hal Hartley. Until then, he had been simply another American independent director whose films, although quirky, failed to have the elegiac resonance of Jim Jarmusch's works or the ebullient yet skewed joie-de-vie of Gus van Sant. Hartley's first two films -- The Unbelievable Truth and Trust -- are both love stories, suburban, Prozac-induced versions of Romeo and Juliet. The joy of a Hal Hartley film is far more understated. It is a kind of sigh of relief on finding a world that, although threatening and overbearing, is still weird enough to take all comers with grace and humor. In Simple Men, it seemed to me that Hartley finally hit his stride (perhaps because I had been living in America for two years, and had managed to tune myself in to Hartley's distinctively New World sense of irony). Suddenly, the stilted and slow drawls the characters intoned, rather than spoke in, ceased to be affected. Suddenly, they were the natural rhythms of a people whose native tongue has been plundered by advertisers and pop culture pirates, and who are slowly rediscovering language in all its glorious and precarious artifice. Suddenly the meandering "stories" ceased to be boring and became reflections of life in the uncertain dust-cloud of millennial America. Criminals and malcontents, Hartley's characters strike out a path of their own. Sure, existential angst is a clich, but his characters refuse to sit around and accept it. Philosophy is carved through life by falling in love and refusing the conventional choices made for you. One of the characters in Simple Men has just turned down a scholarship to a prestigious college to look for his errant criminal father, while another has just messed up a robbery -- because he was in love. Abandoned by the rational world, Hartley's characters create a hermetic logic of their own.
It's a strange and glorious sensation, feeling the manacles of rational constraint slip and the bonds of experience loosen. Of course, line dancing to a Sonic Youth song is just natural. It's cool, but not in the sense of something one must conform to: "cool" as whatever makes you feel good. Cool, Hartley seems to be suggesting, is struggling against a world that fails to accommodate you -- not in order to spite that world, but to live honestly.
Hartley has just released a new film, Amateur, with many members of his traditional ensemble (including Martin Donovan, Elina Lowensohn, and Damian Young) along with a new one, Isabelle Huppert. Huppert saw Simple Men and wrote to Hartley asking for a part in his next film, so he wrote one for her.
The plot concerns a pornographer with amnesia, a nymphomaniac nun who happens to be a virgin (the part written for Isabelle Huppert) because she is "choosy," and two accountants turned into Reservoir Dogs' style gangsters. In their own way, all the characters in Amateur are beginners. All are learning to become something new while trying to lose their past. Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), as the nun who now writes porn stories for magazines, finds the amnesiac, Tom (Martin Donovan), and takes him in. Meanwhile, Tom's wife and their accountant are caught up in the search for a pair of floppy discs (which, as every character takes great pains to point out, are neither floppy nor discs). Some semblance of a story develops from various conversations between people. The film slowly becomes a gangster movie, replete with a spoof on the torture scene in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs.
The comparison with Tarantino is an interesting one. Both are independent filmmakers who have achieved different levels of success. Both won various awards at Cannes -- Tarantino winning the esteemed Palme d'Or and Hartley winning a jury prize. While Tarantino has been lauded in the mainstream as the next Martin Scorsese, Hartley has been virtually ignored. One of the reasons for this is the stylish melodrama of Tarantino's films and their calculated use of violence.
Both filmmakers present members of a criminal underclass, characters quite prepared to murder and rob. However, Hartley's lawbreakers are slightly different. None of them are in it for the money: there is none of the awe shown to Pulp Fiction's mysterious briefcase. Indeed, they break the law by default but preserve a scrupulous traditional morality, evincing a concern for their fellows one is hard put to find in Pulp Fiction. The value codes in Tarantino's films are already set. One important exception is Jules, who with his renunciation of violence and money, and his decision to search for something new, sounds like he's just about to step into a Hartley picture. In Hartley's films the characters are still groping in the dark -- sometimes literally. In Amateur, Tom, the ex-pornographer, has lost his memory, while Isabelle, the nun, is waiting for a message from the Virgin Mary. If Tarantino's films are a celebration of a certain self-made morality, then Hartley's work is a festival of doubt and ambiguity.
Perhaps the difference is best put like this: while Tarantino's characters are conscious criminals, reveling in their lawlessness and indulgence, Hartley's characters are unconscious felons, transgressing the lines of law and order in an attempt to be honest to themselves. No matter how much I admire Tarantino, I cannot escape the feeling at the end of the film that I have somehow been manipulated, that Tarantino knows exactly which buttons on the "gross-out" board to press. Tarantino's use of melodrama to frame violent acts often glamorizes the violence, creating a very confused impression. For every person I talked to who thinks a certain scene in Pulp Fiction is really cool, there's someone else grossed out by it. But Hartley's portrayals of violence are typically elliptical and noncommittal. Most are brief and drained of any drama, avoiding the trap that Tarantino falls into. Indeed, the only violence that takes place in Amateur is in the form of a parody of scenes from Reservoir Dogs.
Perhaps one of the greatest traps into which American movies often fall is the creation of an alternative universe in which glamorous people rub shoulders and violence is a thrill. Hartley eschews the creation of such a fantasy world. His is no frontier dream, rather the cold and rocky home truths of a East Coast old-timer. Can it be a coincidence that Tarantino is a West Coast filmmaker?