Hal Hartley

Families and Bombs: The Long Island Films

International Film Festival. Amateur won the Young Cinema Competition Silver Prize at the 1994 Tokyo International Film Festival; Henry Fool won the Award for Best Screenplay at Cannes in 1998; and Fay Grim won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at the 2007 RiverRun International Film Festival. At least four major retrospectives of Hartley’s work have taken place: at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 1992; at the Gijón International Film Festival in Spain in 2003; at the ERA New Horizons Festival in Wroclaw, Poland, in 2007; and at Museo de Arte Contempor áneo de Castilla y León and the University of León in Spain from December 2009 to January 2010, which included the world premiere of Possible Films 2, Hartley’s second DVD collection of shorts. Hartley was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des letters in 1997, and he taught filmmaking at Harvard University from 2001 to 2004. Hartley and his wife, Miho Nikaido, the Japanese actress and dancer who has appeared in several of his films, relocated to Berlin in 2004 when he was awarded a fellowship by the American Academy. I refer to Hartley’s motion-picture output as “film,” even though he has shot on film and on digital video. Families and Bombs: The Long Island Films The Unbelievable Truth Hartley gradually amplified his experiments with cinematic style and narrative with The Unbelievable Truth, Trust, and Simple Men, the socalled Long Island Trilogy. Each film includes bombs as plot devices and enmeshes the protagonists within unusual romantic couplings and familial conflicts as they attempt to define themselves within and against their social contexts. Hartley’s representation of these struggles leans toward the comedic, although dramatic and poignant moments do appear as he constructs the sometimes volatile intersection of private and personal matters with the public sphere. The Unbelievable Truth depicts the burgeoning romantic relationship between Josh Hutton (Robert John Burke), a white ex-convict virgin in his late twenties, and Audry Hugo (Adrienne Shelly), a smart white teenager whose deep concern about nuclear annihilation mani8 | Hal Hartley fests itself as the recurring sound of exploding bombs that only she hears. Hartley presents the relationship within a chronological yet imprecise timeframe that lacks temporal-spatial cues and uses all-caps intertitles—“AFTER A WHILE,” “A MONTH MAYBE TWO MONTHS LATER”—to complicate matters. Josh and Audry are outsiders in their hometown of Lindenhurst, and they make unusual life choices: he is an expert mechanic who does not drive, while she has been accepted to Harvard University and is critical of consumer mass society but does not plan to attend college and instead becomes a fashion model who hawks luxury consumer goods. (Lindenhurst as the setting is unnamed by the characters, but it is announced on a movie-theater marquee.) As Caryn James summarizes, they are “two beautiful, somber-faced people dressed entirely in black . . . a perfect match [as] the weirdest . . . most sensible characters” in the film, but they do not know each other at its outset (“Applying 1950s Cool to the 80s,” 11) (figure 1). The combination of weird and sensible causes other characters to be threatened by Josh and Audry and to reduce them to essentialist types: Josh is a criminal, Audry is a crazy quasi-leftist, and their possible union might be catastrophic. This social scrutiny delays their romantic relationship for much of the film, primarily within Hartley’s deployment of a Figure 1: audry (adrienne Shelley) and Josh (robert John Burke) in The Unbelievable Truth. The Films of hal hartley | 9 “bad-boy” narrative frame in which a mysterious, possibly violent man seduces a seemingly innocent woman into joining his risky adventures (e.g., Badlands [dir. Terrence Malick, 1973]). Within this narrative vein, the age difference between Josh and Audry generates concern about their romance, as does Josh’s criminal past, which initially is known to all of the characters except Audry. Once Josh and Audry meet, Audry’s father, Vic Hugo (Christopher Cooke), hires Josh to work in his automotive garage as a favor to Audry and as a way to keep them apart. At the garage, Vic and fellow mechanic Mike (Mark Chandler Bailey) spy on Josh and identify him as a “mass murderer” who years ago dated Mike’s girlfriend Pearl’s (Julia McNeal) sister, killed her parents, and possibly killed Pearl’s sister. In a later scene at the...