Oh Hal Hartley...

Fay Grim(dir. Hal Hartley)
It's always hard to articulate my thoughts on his movies due to the fact that it's such a personal experience for me and usually consists of me feeling "god, this is fucking perfect." Sure, no movie is perfect, but some of his movies are as close to perfect as you can possibly get at least with their material. This film took me by surprise. I expected it to be disappointing since the reviews for it have been fairly ho-hum, but this could possibly be his best. Every time I see one of his movies, I say that one is his best even though it's probably due to the fact that it's fresh in my mind and gut. It's amazing at how he basically demolishes Henry Fool in order to make this an enormously satisfying sequel since sequels are usually used to reinforce the film that precedes them. While this film makes Henry Fool perhaps more thematically shallow, you can still watch that film and pretend to be ignorant to the events that happen in this film. I wouldn't quite say this film is as thematically deep as Henry Fool was because it doesn't give the audience much to think about, but there's still some aspects that are fairly thought-provoking mainly how foreign relations are displayed as a confusing web-like mess. Most of the characters seem to be acting on past experiences much like how foreign policy usually is. Henry Fool, the character, probably should not have been shown in this film at all until the end mainly because he's too "big" of a character to have such little screen time. It took a whole feature-length film to really warm up to the character and having a five minute scene with him thrown in the narrative just halts the momentum of the film. The ending is one of those classic Hal Hartley endings where it ends ambiguously and almost unsatisfyingly until the music and credits roll and you sit there and think "god, that was fucking perfect." I could see how some of the stylistic touches like the Dutch angles and the slideshow shoot-outs could be off-putting to some people, but to me, it seems more honest. Hartley always seemed to point out the artifice in his films and employing these stylistic aspects makes the self-deconstructive nature of his work more upfront and accessible to new viewers in my mind. This is easily the best film of the year so far.
**** out of ****