Thomas: "Have you ever had sex?"
Isabelle: "No."
Thomas: "How can you be a nymphomaniac and never had sex?"
Isabelle: "I'm very choosy."
--from Hal Hartley's Amateur
Contradiction is something that has always intrigued filmmaker Hal Hartley. He even named his production company True Fiction Pictures. In his first feature, The Unbelievable Truth (prompting irony again), Hartley considered whether you could love someone but not trust them. He continued to develop that ironic dichotomy in his next two films, Trust and Simple Men
In his latest film, Amateur, Isabelle Huppert plays Isabelle, a virginal ex-nun who considers herself a nymphomaniac, and Martin Donovan plays Thomas, an amnesiac with whom she falls in love. Once again, Hartley sets out to ponder the incongruities of life. Can you be both a virgin and a nymphomaniac? Can you love someone who has no identity? Can you still be held responsible for things you cannot remember and for the person you no longer are? His obsession extends to even the smallest details as when someone is shown a floppy disk and frowns at the misnomer since the item is stiff and square.
Hartley's cinematic style also contains contradictions. He mixes flashes of rapid dialogue with long silences. He uses a spare, economical style to create films of surprising lyricism. Amateur, as with his previous films, is too carefully constructed to be naturalistic yet its ability to pare everything down to the bare essentials conveys a sense of purity and truth. Isabelle (Isabelle) and Thomas (Martin Donovan) typify Hartley's characters who are generally confused or in the midst of change yet they possess fierce convictions or a driving sense of purpose. Hartley also finds humor in serious things but his humor is of the driest variety. In Amateur, Hartley departs from his previous films by going for a much darker comic tone. The film also marks a departure for Hartley because it is the first time that he is working in a recognizable genre -- the thriller/action film. And maybe that is the ultimate irony, and why all these Hartley characters seem somehow incongruous with their environment. Both the characters and Hartley himself are amateurs in the film's milieu of violence and ruthless corporate crime.
With only a handful of feature films to his credit, Hartley has already established himself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary cinema. All his films seem part of an ongoing process to make some sort of philosophical sense out of life. Describing Hartley's style is difficult because it is unique. His staccato dialogue, which has become his trademark, recalls the rhythms of playwrights Harold Pinter and David Mamet. He also shares some traits with fellow filmmakers who have chosen to remain very independent. As with the Coen brothers, he pursues perfection with a ferocious single-mindedness and imprints his vision on every frame of his film. Like Peter Greenaway, he tries to impose some sort of cinematic order on the emotional chaos of life. And like Whit Stillman, he is a meticulous writer with a flair for clever, biting dialogue. Hartley' style also reveals the diverse influence of older filmmakers. He makes films that are as deadpan as Buster Keaton's, as transcendent as Robert Bresson's and as verbally adroit and funny as Preston Sturges'. Yet his films are not derivative of past films and genres in the way that say Quentin Tarantino's films are. Hartley's films are fresh and original but with a knowing sense of where they come from. But these comparisons only hint at his style which is wholly and uniquely his own.
Hartley, who took a break from post-production work on his next feature Flirt to do this interview, is a soft-spoken man who employs long silences (much like in his films), as if he were editing his thoughts before speaking. He is thoughtful, unpretentious, sincere and surprisingly good-natured considering that I am interrupting his intensive editing.
The filmmaker says that he chose the title Amateur for his latest film because he liked the various connotations it had: "Well the root of amateur means to love. I like the double play. We use it popularly to mean, kind of in a derogatory sense, a non-professional, well not really derogatory but just a distinction of non-professional. But its actual older meaning is to love, which makes sense because if you are an amateur filmmaker you would make films out of love. You weren't doing it to make your living, you're doing it for fun. So it does exist a little bit in its original form. But like in French it is equivalent to fan. So I liked the different kinds of readings that one word conveys and also I liked what it can conveyed of a sense of a new beginning, a freshness, starting with a clean slate."
His film certainly encompasses all these meanings. In a sense he focuses on three amateurs: Isabelle, whose sexual naivete and years in the convent make her ill-prepared for the real world; Thomas, who can't remember his unsavory past as a pornographer and must begin life afresh; and Sofia (Elina Lowensohn), Thomas' porn star wife whose unskilled attempt to blackmail a corrupt businessman puts all three of them in danger and out of their depths. When a pair of brutal corporate assassins (and former CPAs) threaten Sofia and Thomas, Isabelle realizes that it's her mission to save Sofia and help Thomas with whom she's fallen in love.
The film raises many of the issues that have fascinated Hartley since he made his first student film back in 1984. He notes that "religion, sex and money are themes common to all my films. You could describe
Trust as the making of a saint in suburbia and Amateur offers us an ex-nun who believes that God has a special mission for her to accomplish. And like The Unbelievable Truth, Amateur offers a female character who uses her sexuality to make money. In the earlier film it was a teenager who becomes a model in order to pay off a debt to her father and in Amateur it is a porno star who's told that she's a commodity, a useful thing, in terms of classic capitalism. The film also touches on issues of love and trust, defining oneself and the notion of escape or at least realizing what it is you are trying to run away from."
Amateur takes Hartley's theme of searching for one's identity to an extreme. "An amnesiac," Hartley explains, "was very interesting because most of the time when you begin to work with an actor, you create a background history for the character. You make it up and it helps in the beginning stages of rehearsal to form the character. So I said let's deprive ourselves of the history part. You just start off at the beginning of the film and you have no character. And the character will be accumulated as your character moves through the movie. So that was very exciting and yes it brought up tons of questions about identity. The first one being, Martin wanted to know if he should portray any of the old Thomas, the Thomas that existed before the movie began that everybody else seems to know something about but he doesn't. And I said no just don't worry about the old Thomas, you play the new Thomas and let everybody else in a sense portray the old Thomas."
In the press materials, Hartley describes Amateur as "a Hal Hartley action film and that probably means that I got it wrong somehow." The statement seems both self-deprecating and boastful as if he feels not worthy of the task but at the same time pleased that he is not making the same kind of genre film as everyone else. He elaborated on this by adding, "I was in a sense appropriating elements and gestures from action movies and I think with the full intention of using them the way I wanted to. The priority was to use these things in making a Hal Hartley movie. I wasn't really making an action movie. It wasn't like I was bending my sensibilities toward the action movies, it was more like I was taking these pieces of action movies and using them as raw material for a movie which was more than anything else evidence of my personal manner or feeling, my sensibility. And it's okay to say that you might have gotten something wrong because I really think style has as much to do with what you get right as what you get wrong."
There is a wonderful moment in Amateur, which reflects Hartley's comments. It comes when Isabelle has just read one of her pornographic stories to her publisher who tells her quite bluntly that it's bad. Then she asks what exactly is wrong with it, and he says, "It's not pornographic, it's poetry and don't you try and deny it." One can imagine the Hollywood studios condemning Hartley for not delivering the sex and violence they expect in a thriller, and for delivering instead something more cerebral and provocative. Hartley's film is all about setting up expectations and then thwarting them. He makes a film centered on a pornographer and a porno star but there is no explicit sex in his film. In fact, Hartley makes us aware of how the media objectifies women and subtly criticizes that just as he criticizes the way we accept violence and even torture as the standard for a contemporary film.
One of the trademarks of a Hartley film is its precise minimalism. Nothing is in the film unless Hartley wants it to be there, that goes for an object in the background or a gesture by an actor. When it comes to directing his actors, Hartley seems to be a firm believer in the precept of less is more. Hartley says, "that minimalism comes from the manner in which they [the actors] speak and also it probably comes from my underlying aesthetic approach to making a whole film, which sees the actor as being part of the film, this is not a film that has actors in it, it is not a film of these actors acting. The actors contribute to a film in the way a cameraman does, the way an editor does, a sound recordist does. I have a pretty clear idea from moment to moment what's too big. It's just as if you have a music cue that's too huge and seems to have nothing to do with the other component parts of the piece that you're making. It's indulgent. I look at acting that way too. So I don't know what comes first, probably a particular idea or feeling in myself tells me what the tone of the piece should be. Then everything, the photography, the music, the sound recording, the editing, the acting and the writing all contribute to that. And all kind of refer to that. as a stabilizer, a touchstone. I don't want anybody's contribution to be so particular as to take away from the guiding aesthetic principle of the entire piece. The piece itself should have a personality. There shouldn't be disparate personalities within the piece."
Donovan, who has appeared in many Hartley films, noted that Hartley's direction was sparse and often as succinct as, "Faster. Less. Or don't use your face." Robert Burke, who starred in The Unbelievable Truth and Simple Men, described him as, "A director with a strong vision and the kind of guy who writes everyday and will knock off Anna Karenina in a weekend because he's never read it before." His most recent star, Isabelle Huppert, is quoted in the press materials as saying "his films have a certain way of showing complexities and ambiguities that you don't often find in American cinema. There is something very poetic, an aesthetic, in his films. He is a real auteur in the European sense."
Hartley agrees that his films have a European sensibility and that may have hurt his films here in the U.S.
"My films play a lot more and are a lot more popular in France and England than here," he notes, "At around the time of Trust I started a partnership with an English company, Zenith, that has coordinated financing for all of my films since then. And they get their money from European sources and English sources. That's the way it has to be. There was no one in America expressing interest in my work. It was more like they said, 'It's too bad your films aren't more conventional because then I could raise you some money,' whereas the English and French are like, 'No no, it's fine, as long as they don't cost too much money this is a totally viable project."
Harley's films have a visual consistency, what he calls "sharing a common vocabulary." He often restricts himself to a single lens so that the depth of field remains constant. Then he may even refuse to rack focus when a second character enters a shot in the background because he does not want to cheat the cameras perspective. His images avoid what he considers superfluous details such as establishing shots. He prefers to thrust us into a new scene with abrupt cuts. He also favors stark tableaux that sometimes offer an off kilter perspective on the world. In Hartley's world, silence can be as meaningful as dialogue and gesture as expressive as words. His characters only speak when they really have something to say and then they speak directly and to the point.
Hartley is definitely an acquired taste and Amateur is not as easy to like as the exquisite Trust. Yet
Amateur is a provocative, darkly comic and meticulously crafted film that refuses to conform to Hollywood conventions as it challenges its viewers to do more than passively watch.
Although Hartley's style has the precision of science, he is a little uncomfortable with that word: "I wouldn't say science but design definitely. I definitely see myself as a filmmaker as being an aspect of being a designer. I design movement in space like a choreographer and I design color and light with my cinematographer Michael Spiller and I design words on the page. Science is too cold, not open enough to ambiguity. In one sense science is great because it means you're open to experimentation and to looking at things without preconceptions which I think is very important. But it doesn't convey the thing that you generally convey when you're talking about creativity or the arts, & which is a willingness to not necessarily come up with a conclusion which is what necessarily keeps science cold. You have to reach a conclusion at every step of the way. I as artists we don't necessarily have to reach a conclusion -- the expression, the evidence, the personal manner of feeling is the much more important thing.
Amateur is Hartley's darkest film, and it ends on a fittingly ironic note that turns Thomas' search for identity into tragic tale of redemption.
Companion viewing: The Unbelievable Truth, Trust, Simple Men
