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MovieMail's Review
Before Little Miss Sunshine, before Frozen Lake, before Buffalo 66 or any of a handful of American indies indebted to him were so much as a twinkle in their creator’s eye, Hal Hartley was establishing the patent for American indies: movies based around character rather than plot, populated, for the most part, by Americans with a European sensibility, and movies that were stylised, intellectual, offbeat, theatrical, and intimate.
This boxset is a great introduction. You have a glimpse of how playful a film-maker he is with Trust, a film made in just 11 days; a glimpse of Hartley the intellectual in Henry Fool – part Barton Fink, part Eraserhead and part Harold Lloyd – and, a glimpse of Hartley the arch-stylist in his surprising sci-fi, The Girl from Monday. Also containing the short films Ambition and Theory of Achievement – the latter inspired by Godard’s La Chinoise – this set is a very welcome release.
Bonus Short Films: The Theory of Achievement (1991) & Ambition (1991)
Making-of Documentaries
Trailers.
Film Description
Three films from the pioneering American independent filmmaker Hal Hartley. Features Trust (1990), Henry Fool (1997) and The Girl from Monday (2005).
Trust tells the dark comic take of an unlikely romance between a well-meaning yet thoughtless pregnant teenager, (Adrienne Shelly) and a frustrated young man (Martin Donovan). This sets the scene for a tale of uneasy romance, but within its small, dark and funny range, it stays alert to the mysteries of love.
Henry Fool is a Faustian black comedy about a nerdy garbage man whose life is turned upside down by Henry Fool – an ex-convict, sex-offending, chain-smoking, beer-guzzling egomaniac. Henry opens a magical world of literature to Simon who turns his hand to writing the ‘great American poem’, but as Simon begins his controversial ascent to the dizzying heights of Nobel Prize winning poet, Henry’s past is about to catch up with him.
The Girl from Monday: In this twist on the sci-fi genre, Hal Hartley presents our world in the not-too-distant future where a girl from another constellation finds herself on earth in search of a friend she believes is in trouble. What awaits her is a world in turmoil where sex is used for commercial gain and barcoding and body-trading has become the norm.
