Doing Damage

AMATEUR

by Graham Fuller

Hal Hartley’s Amateur is both a continuation and a departure for the New York based filmmaker. Like his three previous features, it is the story of a troubled man and a woman who meet and edge towards a relationship but are restrained by their self-doubts. The rhythm, the ambience, and the mise-en-scène of Amateur are transparently the work of the same precision engineer who made The Unbelievable Truth (1989), Trust (1990), and Simple Men (1992). The irony, the romantic negotiations, and the firmly-stoppered volcano of emotions that identify Hartley’s cinema can each be checked off in this latest work: all present and correct.

Yet Amateur is Hartley’s darkest film yet, a tragedy rather than a melodrama. Its protagonists, the amnesic pornographer Thomas (Martin Donovan); Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), the ex-nun who falls in love with him; Sofia (Elina Löwensohn), his young porn star wife, who has tried to kill him; and Edward, the ex-crime accountant who tries to protect Sofia, are, respectively, saturnine, melancholy, bitter, and cynical. We have seen similarly disposed characters in Hartley’s films before. But where Amateur differs from its predecessors is in its occupation of the thriller genre. The word occupation strikes me as particularly apposite, for while Hartley was never likely to have churned out the kind of glossy sex-and-crime drama that has become an atrophied Hollywood formula in the last decade, its conventions and vernacular provid-ed him with well-trodden territory in which to explore his own preoccupations and, to use an expression he uses a lot, “do damage” to them. The title of the film, I hazard, refers equally to Hartley the thriller director as it does to Thomas or Isabelle, each of whom is tentatively making his or her way in a new world.

The premise—a Hal Hartley action thriller, or a romantic thriller —is instantaneously incongruous. We are not used to hearing people in his films talk about “high-level government corruption” or such entities as the “highly

respectable yet ultimately sinister international corporation with political connections” from which Thomas, Sofia and Edward have fled. Hartley, in fact, italicizes this kind of thriller speak in the dialogue, drawing attention to its generic function and it its absurdity. There is in the film this kindred fascination with the jargon of business and modern consumer technology. When Sofia asks Edward about some incriminating floppy disks (which, as she and later Thomas observe, are neither floppy nor disks) and tells him that she intends to be “a mover and a shaker”, Elina Löwensohn’s brilliant readings convey all the amateurism of someone using these phrases for the first time, discovering them as found objects. The deliberate self-consciousness lays bare the way we appropriate and reinvent language and rob it of its original meanings.

Amateur, then, is not simply a film that’s about what it’s about. The intellectual enquiry here extends to the analyses of—or, at least, a worrying about—the sexual objectification of women and movie violence. Because Thomas, de-socialized by amnesia and Isabelle, reborn into a secular existence, are innocents abroad, they are perfect guinea pigs with whom to confront such potentially alienating influences as pornography and “sexy clothes”. (A line spoken by Isabelle, “I know nothing about sex, perversion or violent crime,” was cut from the film as if it spelled out too plainly the philosophical quest behind it.) Hartley, though, does not proselytize; where Simple Men quietly concluded that misogyny is self-defeating, Amateur is more concerned with examining than pontificating about the sexual dynamic between men and women. Accordingly, in his presentation of violence—a slapstick violence as choreographed as the dance sequences in Simple Men and Hartley’s TV film Surviving Desire (1991)—Hartley sets up torture and shootings as something he is testing, not something he is indulging for his or our pleasure. In all these respects Amateur is his most political film so far, and his least comforting.

Throughout, their visual and verbal economy, and the impression they give you of being the only way they could have been made, is reflected in their maker’s meticulousness and his general disdain for the extraneous. There is no fat here at all: Hartley mien is as lean as his aesthetic (even his name is tidily alliterative).

So the movies become the man—in this case, a singular, driven auteur of modern manners striving to make order of emotional turmoil by rigorously distilling it into images of fervid purity. But a word of caution: Amateur, like Hartley’s other films, has a big heart. Among several peripheral characters who encounter the central quartet is Officer Patsy Melville, a policewoman so scandalized by the random cruelty of the world that she shows an endearing solicitude to each casualty or criminal who fetches up at the precinct where she is on booking duty.  It’s a piece of characterization and a performance, by actor Pamela Stewart, that “does damage” to our expectations about thrillers and cops and the very notion of screen drama in the most delightful and Hartleyesque way.

Graham Fuller
June 1994