The Girl from Monday

It has a promising plot line, and some quite interesting performances and direction, but overall I felt the film lacked substance.

Except for its unique idea of sex-for-points, it's filled with simple notions such as "advertising is bad" and "freedom is good." Both are valid beliefs, but neither are explored with much originality.

It played out like a weak version of an excellent novel or short story. Great soundtrack, though.

(BTW, I believe the opening credits read "A Science Fiction by Hal Hartley," not "A Science Fiction Film by Hal Hartley," as the first reviewer wrote. Not sure exactly what he means by that, but it is probably significant to Hartley.)

It is a typical Hal Hartley in terms of the mood he creates. Long in-door shots, the disconcert between sound and sight. As always he uses cheap material. for instance one suspects that the black goggles that the cops wear -with the red light in the center- may be like a 10 dollar toy bought from Chinatown. But this combined with the camera moves and lights allows him to create a different world that is often visually convincing. Although I heard people in the audience murmur about the connection with the space being unconvincing, I totally disagree.

It is a meditation on capitalism where the term 'flesh market' gets literal. He weaves this theme in with reflections on the sense of the extremeness of the boundaries between individuals in modern capitalist society. How one feeds the other, in fact makes the other possible. I found it very successful although sometimes a bit didactic.

"Simple Men," "Amateur," and "Henry Fool" are among the films of Hal Hartley--one of the wittiest and most sophisticated independent directors working in America today.

After seeing "Simple Men," I eagerly waited the release on video of each new Hartley film, and relentlessly hunted down his early work and short films as well. Mostly, I found his movies to be totally and refreshingly offbeat, unpredictable, and irreverent--yet also very watchable--with great plots, likable characters, and a sense of humor that was wry and goofy by turns.

His photographic style was crisp and painterly; and though it may it may have looked conventional, its flat lighting and muted colors, coupled with deadpan dialogue and the movement and ear of a good play, it was obvious to anyone that this was genuine "auteur" direction.

But Hartley's more recent work—"The Book of Life," "No Such Thing," and now "The Girl from Monday," has failed to stir in me even the slightest interest. There are vestiges in these films of vintage Hartley; but the thrill is definitely gone.

As he did in "The Book of Life," Hartley once again decides to offset the horizon in almost every scene—a few degrees to the left, a few degrees to the right—and he indulges in other eccentricities as well, like cutting out frames to make the motion jagged, or moving the camera in and out of focus—in short adding disruption after disruption--all to no purpose that I can discover. Personally, I find nothing interesting and nothing functional in this new, crabbed style of his.

The plot of "Girl" is jejune in the extreme—yet another distopic look at a future of totalitarian rule, with a bit of alien intervention to muddy the mix still further. (Someone on this list compared the sci-fi facet to "The Man Who Fell To Earth." Indeed, the theft is so blatant, Roeg should have been mentioned in the credits.) This movie has little to recommend it—even for a Hartley enthusiast like I (was).

Is this Hartley following Godard's footsteps and becoming "political"? Political commentary is never interesting, unless it is executed in an interesting way. Luckily, this is one of those cases.

I'm amazed at the quality of the shots considering they used a DCR-VX2000 for this movie. How many cameras did they use? One I suspect.

Hartley's World is that of an intelligent essayist, specially since he quit making movies like "Surviving Desire" and "Trust". "Theory of Achievement" was heavily influenced by "La Chinoise", as much as the form of a "short" could take it. Here we have the same intent, but turned into a fictional narrative. It works, but only if you understand the reasoning behind it.

In which Hartley continues his exploration of the Godard cookbook. In this case, "Alphaville", with side orders of "The Man Who Fell to Earth" and various Chris Marker 'photoroman' movies.

The voice-over is not a cover for the failure to tell the story so much as a yarn-spinning technique along the lines of early Peter Greenaway or late Werner Herzog. There are some striking similarities with Herzog's recent "Wild Blue Yonder" (also billed as a science fiction fantasy).

In some ways this seems as much an exercise as an attempt to entertain; as with Godard's work the film is shot on a shoestring, with the present made to stand in for the future - Hartley tries to see how much he can say with how little.

Others have commented on the social satire; overlooked may have been the beautiful photography, the dreamlike atmosphere, the air of melancholy and loss, and the very effective music by Hartley himself (no longer trading under his "Ned Rifle" alias).

I dare say many of us miss his "early, funny, films" but that's how it goes with New York filmmakers, I guess. Where those movies were snappy prose, this is a poem.