Confusion and schizophrenia

I was toying with the idea to write about a horror movie, being Halloween and all, but unfortunately, the only horror film that I deeply respect but I chose not to is Dracula by Werner Herzog, with Bruno Ganz and adorable Isabella Adjani. Check it out. But, as we say in Bosnia, "Where all the Turks, there will little Mujo go," but since I was the one never following the traditions, I am going to talk about Hartley's Amateur.

Hal Hartley's movies, even though placed deep in reality, urban isolation and mishaps, insisting that the dialogue is alive and realistic, have something much closer to Greek theatre than life. Actors in Hartley's movies are always in focus. Quite often they have short revealing, psychologically complex monologues, not longer than a sentence or two, not as acting that we have seen in an average film, but theatrical, exaggerating almost every emotion, behaving like the point of the film is the shot in which the character says those words.

Remember Tarantino's stories, Pulp Fiction, 4 Rooms? Hartley's stories are written in a very similar style, with similar themes, only his stories are developed somewhat slower, his characters usually have two conflicting identities, two character traits that have almost nothing to do with each other. Take, for example, character Isabelle, played by Isabelle Hupert whom we see in a coffee shop sitting in her favourite spot, writing pornography on her laptop. She is a former nun, and a virgin, and, of course, a nymphomaniac.

The movie starts with a man (Martin Donovan) waking up from a nasty fall from some window enters a pub where Isabelle writes. He is suffering from amnesia abd harbours some terrible secrets, as it will be explained later. She takes him home and gets involved with him and tries to recreate him. She actually reinvents him. As he is now interested and in love with her, he tries to find out about her. Upon hearing about her past and her character traits, he asks her "How can you be a nymphomaniac and never have sex?" Her response comprises the beauty of Hartley's style of telling a story. As she looks back at him she says, "I'm choosy."

We now look at an amazingly beautiful woman Sofia (Elina Lowensohn), porn actress, that was pushed into drugs at the age of 12 by Thomas, who married her. As she threatened to leave, he tried to disfigure her and she pushes him out the window and we learn that the unnamed guy played by Martin Donovan is Thomas. But he is gentle, caring, confused, nothing like the description of his past. She joins a friend, Edward (Damian Young), a man formerly in business with Thomas that is running away from it all now.

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