Amateur: Prince Hal's Masterpiece 

“Ill-weaved ambition,

How much art thou shrunk!” – Henry IV, Part I (Act 5, Scene 4)

*

Who is Hal Hartley, and why do you need to watch his films?

I know that there are many of you who saw this particular Challenge as a way to praise the early years of Quentin Tarantino, look back at the Matrix films (maybe even the Star Wars prequels?), and tell us all about the movies and cinematic memories that we all know too well. I was tempted to go with something pretty obvious, and yet, I could not do it. If the whole point of this is to make me “long for simpler times before the millennium hit,” then there was only one director who came to mind, and only one film, out of many that I admired (“Trust”, “Simple Men”, “Henry Fool”) worth the time it would take to discuss it.

Hal Hartley released the movie “Amateur” in 1994 after some early indie-credible success with a few of the above mentioned films and “The Unbelievable Truth” (a 1989 release, and not acceptable for the Challenge). I had a good friend who worked in a video store, and she would often provide me with free movies and suggestions that I might have missed if I had not had her working in the trenches (a very Tarantino idea, if you consider his pre-cinematic career). What I first noticed with the work of Mr. Hartley was that it did not have the same kind of momentum and drive that you could get from a Spielberg or Michael Bey. His rhythms and lines were all his own, as if you were stepping inside the very uncomfortable skin of a man who needed the camera to get those ideas out of his mind. Fights were staged like vaudeville routines; gunplay was spare, but often ridiculous…until it became all too real; love was painful and not always a guarantee that things would get better.

And this leads me to “Amateur”, a film about gangsters, pornography, love, nuns, amnesia and escaping from your past. All of this struck me as novel and intriguing, as did the cast and the story. It begins with a body in the street – Martin Donovan – and a woman who makes a tentative approach to see if he is alive – Elena Lowensohn – takes a light kick at him, and then runs away. This is Sophia, and the man on the street was not only her husband, Thomas, but a man involved with gangsters, drug-dealing and pornography, with his wife in a starring role in many of those films. He is on the street because she saw her chance to escape and pushed him out of a window, and…

Well, we in the audience know nothing about this at first. We are as lost as he is when he wakes up, goes to a local café, and discovers an ex-nun working on a pornographic story for a magazine. This is Isabelle played by…Isabelle Huppert, one of those icons of cinema who throws out all the expected conventions so much that you have to keep her name for the character. She is revealed to be an ex-nun, a contributor to a dirty magazine – remember them? – a nymphomaniac…who has never had sex. We see her being groped on a date in a theatre, and how her own line explains the contradiction: “I’m choosy.” For Martin, she is his only option, since he now has amnesia, a pocketful of Swiss currency, and nowhere else to go. In a sense, they are both amateurs. It took me a long time to get a handle on the title of this one – how did it apply; was it one character above the others – but simply everyone we encounter in the film is trying to handle something that they have never handled before. Sophia gets even more deeply involved with gangster, leading to another innocent man – Damian Young (Edward) – being tortured and forced to learn all over again how to survive. Martin and Isabelle slowly learn more about each other and fall in love (it is interesting that their kiss is the most believable moment in the entire film), with consequences that no one sees coming, despite what the story demands.

This is why it was my choice for the Challenge. I was about twenty-one years old when I saw this, trying to decide what to do with myself after realizing that any dreams I had about becoming a scientist were being doused by the cold and wet reality of life as a student in a university far from home. I had not had a girlfriend worth the title, somehow always finding a way to screw it up or ending up in the “friendzone” without a way out (not sure if we even called it that back then). The rhythms and pace of my life matched up with what I saw in Mr. Hartley’s films, and I was grateful to no longer feel that alone (still strange to me that these films were made in the same New York of Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen or…well, insert any other big-name director here, and you will understand what I mean). “Amateur” was not considered his best film – “Henry Fool” received more praise and is considered a peak – and Mr. Hartley is now a classic example of a talent lost that we have almost forgotten. For me, however, I will always return to this particular story and hope that I have the courage to face what can be frightening, disturbing and very uncomfortable – that long race we call life.

Thank you, Prince Hal.

Please come back to us one day.