Cinema of Hal Hartley by Manley Sebastian;

Author:Manley, Sebastian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

4

From Old Territory to New: Henry Fool (1997) and Fay Grim (2006)

As I have argued in previous chapters, Hartley’s filmography is characterized by a shift in emphasis from themes of family and small-town community to themes of globalization and social fragmentation. If Fay Grim may be seen as the culmination of this shift, Henry Fool, made in 1997, stands as a somewhat anomalous project in Hartley’s sequence of features, as it returns (after the city-set features Amateur and Flirt) to the milieu of the suburban family home familiar from the Long Island films. Like The Unbelievable Truth, Trust and Simple Men, Henry Fool offers an offbeat, (darkly) comic portrait of suburban life that is heavily invested in the particularities of the local environment. By contrast, Fay Grim, Hartley’s 7-years-on sequel to Henry Fool, foregrounds a thoroughly international urban topography: among the film’s settings are New York City, Paris, Istanbul and (briefly, in a flashback sequence) Afghanistan. A bewilderingly intricate tale of CIA initiatives, double-crosses and geopolitical conflicts, Fay Grim positions itself in the tradition of the espionage/noir film while offering an idiosyncratic take on genre conventions that is typical of Hartley’s feature-length work. Reviews of Fay Grim, while reserving some praise for the film’s generic innovations and for the performances of Parker Posey and Jeff Goldblum, were generally mixed or negative1 – a critical response in great contrast to that of Henry Fool, the notices for which featured some of the strongest praise of Hartley’s entire career.2

Henry Fool’s critical success was complemented by a degree of box-office success and a modest profit: the film achieved a total gross of $1.3 million, slightly surpassing the budget of $1 million.3 That the film made a profit at all is notable in the context of Hartley’s previous output, which includes only one profitable film (The Unbelievable Truth, which was made for $75,000 and grossed a little over $546,000).4 In an interview with Graham Fuller about Henry Fool, Hartley explains that playability to a broad(er) audience was a key issue, even at the production/pre-production stage:

I think of [gross-out, or ‘Rabelaisian’] stuff as among the central pleasures of movie-going. I’m someone who’s constantly wondering, ‘Why are people going to see my movies?’ or ‘Why are they not going to see my movies but are going to others?’ and I talk to people about it. And it seems people want to see sex in movies, they want to see violence, they want to see perversion. So, as an entertainer and without being cynical about it, I thought, ‘How can I make the kind of movie I want to make and still provide these things?’5

The marketable elements that Hartley mentions here – sex, violence and perversion – were key to much independent cinema in the 1990s, owing in large part to the rise of Miramax and the popularization of that company’s highly successful ‘exploitation’-style marketing tactics. sex, lies and videotape (1989), Scandal (1989), The Crying Game (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994) were all sold by Miramax through

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