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May 22, 2007

Fay Grim

I saw Hal Hartley's Henry Fool around the same time I discovered James Joyce, and to a certain extent I credit both for igniting in me a conscious passion for literature. Perhaps that attribution is a little off balance; I revisited A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man last year, but I haven't seen Hartley's film since it was in theaters. I remember loving it, though, and hope it's not in complete ignorance that I love it still.

Ten years later, Henry Fool's sequel, Fay Grim, has a decidedly different tone; Hartley has taken the bookish thrills of the first film and replaced them with the real deal. Henry's wife, the titular Fay, discovers that her missing husband may have been an international spy, and that his eight volumes of unreadable confessions may be a heavily coded set of incideniary documents. Global hijinks ensue, all designed with the explicit intention of giving Parker Posey center stage. She's a joy to watch, of course, but what caught me off guard was how dramatically satisfying the film was as a sequel; it's a massive bit of revisionism that (I think) that feels like a natural extension. Hartley's the kind of director who can drop an explosive diarrhea scene smack dab in the middle of an intellectual comedy and come out on top, and he pulls off the same tricks here. No matter how ludicrous or slapstick he gets, there's always something strangely grounded about this comedy of massive errors; a vibrating cell phone hidden in Posey's panties feels right at home alongside a very serious case of suicide bombing. I imagine (but can't say for sure) that it's a case of constants; that Hartley's changed the context, but not the characters.

He only makes two missteps. The first is that he's shot the entire film at dutch angles. The second is a long scene that reintroduces Thomas Jay Ryan - Henry Fool himself. It's an interesting scene, a one act play in and of itself, but it's so far outside Fay's periphery that it feels tacked on, and it comes close, very close, to stealing the punch from the final exchange of shots. A familiarity with Henry Fool is not a prerequisite for this film until this poignant sting of a conclusion, which is just about the point when I suddenly realized that these two disparate works were pretty intimately conjoined after all.

I've moved Henry Fool to the top of my Netflix queue; it's currently listed as a very long wait.

* * *

So clearly, I didn't make it to Cannes this year, as I was originally planning; the absence of There Will Be Blood (now tipped to bow at Venice), and a general deficit in cash helped seal the deal. As always, though, I've been following along on a day to day basis over at GreenCine (and, from there, a host of other sites) and watching what seems to be an unusually large number of clips from the films playing above and below the Croisette. The three teaser trailers for My Blueberry Nights have been joined by clips from Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park and Harmony Korine's Mr. Lonely,. And then of course there are the five scenes from the Coens' adaptation of No Country For Old Men. They're perfect. I wish I hadn't watched them.

Posted by David Lowery at May 22, 2007 11:39 PM

Comments

Posted by: frank Mosley at May 25, 2007 12:43 AM

Posted by: Maya at June 4, 2007 12:07 PM

Posted by: Ghostboy at June 4, 2007 2:47 PM