Amateur

Amateur

Hal Hartley creates films that are grounded in reality despite their tendency to be filled with flat, realistic dialogue and deadpan characters. This commitment to the actual world is visible even as the story goes on a flight of fancy. If you could watch “Amateur,” his latest film, without hearing what anyone says, it would appear to be a crime-and-isolation slice of life set in some city. The visuals would seem appropriate; you’d think that the people inhabited a reasonable movie universe.

You would be mistaken. In a Hartley picture, the plot gradually reveals peculiar secrets and unknown kinships; its characters usually bear two mutually exclusive identity tags pro baseball player and murderer; friendly garage mechanic and serial killer. In “Amateur,” there is also a former nun who directs pornography. Needless to say, she’s a nymphomaniac and a virgin.

This character, named Isabelle, is played by Isabelle Huppert. We first see her in a coffee shop, where she sits writing smut on her portable computer at the same booth for hours on end. Later one character will ask her, not unreasonably: “How can you be a nymphomaniac and never have sex?” She will look back with those great solemn eyes and say: “I’m choosy.” The movie has begun with a man lying apparently dead in the street; later he staggers into the coffee shop and tries to pass Dutch money though from his words we know he’s an American.

“Do you smoke?” someone asks him. “I don’t know,” he replies. He has amnesia after taking an ugly fall out of an upper window.

He looks like an affable regular guy next door indeed, he is played by Martin Donovan, one of Hartley’s favorite actors (he looks as clean cut as any father from any 1950s sitcom). Naturally he has a lot of unpleasant secrets; later on a woman named Sofia (Elina Lowensohn) will tell us that he got her hooked on drugs when she was 12, married her, put her in porno films and threatened to disfigure her. Only then did she push him out the window.

Who is this man? Huppert invites him back to her tiny flat, talks about herself and becomes involved in an attempt to reconstruct his past. Other characters show up: an arms dealer, the publisher of porn books who pays Huppert for stories. I was going to say none of these people are quite what they seem but actually, they are: What happens in a Hartley movie is not that individuals disclose things about themselves, but that they take themselves by surprise through altering their natures.

It’s as if all the characters were slightly dazed maybe by blows on the head and woke up with name tags and life assignments that they try dutifully to play until clearing heads expose choices and freedoms: They realize that nothing in their lives is mandatory; they could just as easily be someone else.

Isabelle exercised that freedom already when she left the convent and started writing dirty books though we will find out that neither act proceeded from anything like whatever we might guess.

Now Thomas (the Martin Donovan character) and Sofia can both be emboldened by Isabelle into reinventing themselves.

But what is Hartley up to? I’ve seen four of his films, and it seems like he wants to get out from under the heel of traditional storytelling. You know the kind: characters are given names and personalities, they choose up sides and wrestle for two hours; we all know who we’re supposed to like and who we’re supposed to hate, so we can guess what’s going to happen, so ultimately we’re bored although often not until later. Well, you don’t get bored in a Hartley movie, although you may become uninterested when you realize that his manipulations are just as random as any old plot’s.

Some filmmakers seem to be trying some new ways of putting together the same old landscapes: Hartley joins Atom Egoyan, Milcho Manchevski, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Quentin Tarantino and David Lynch, among others. Maybe something is happening here. I got an e-mail the other day about a guy who claims to have discovered a “nine-act structure” that he says governs every single one of the 100 most successful films of all time. Hartley and these guys would like to take all nine acts and put them somewhere where they do not belong.

At this point in time though, is “Amateur” any good? Worth seeing? The plot seemed more interesting than it turned out to be, and I’m finding writing about the movie more fun than sitting through it was.

I find myself clapping for Hartley more than this film. He’s on an exciting trip. The view might get better from here there on out.

Watch Amateur For Free On Gomovies.