Through. . . The most interesting period in the work of American independent director Hal Hartley fits into only 10 years - from 1989 to 1998. And reaching the fortieth birthday, he began to shoot more genre and to some extent commercialized films, dropping lowest in the sequel “Henry Fula” called “Fay Grim”, where there is almost no gap between the parody and the object of parody, as if this tape was created by another Hollywood artisan, faceless worker of conveyor production.
All the more curious is Hartley’s peculiar return to himself in the relatively new film Meantime (2011), which does not even pull the title of full-length, since it lasts a little less than an hour. In fact, during his nearly thirty-year career in film, this director repeatedly alternated large and small films, sometimes using a novelistic construction (as in Flirt, where the originally shot in New York short was played twice with the same plot in Berlin and Tokyo). In principle, the free structure of the narrative (very conventionally it can be called so: “through”) was inherent in the best works of Hal Hartley – from “The Incredible Truth” to the mentioned “Henry Ful”, because the author was not so concerned with retelling the story, but rather wanted to capture the whimsical stream of life on the screen, when the characters he invented suddenly began to behave unpredictably and as he pleased.
So in the tape “Meanwhile”, which by a strange association can resemble the masterpiece of Otar Ioseliani “There lived a singing thrush” (by the way, the American Joseph is fond of, among other things, playing percussion instruments, and the Georgian Gia was a litavrist in the orchestra), the main character carries through the life of the big city somehow easily, uninhibited and unpretentiously. He is ready to do almost everything from exporting windows from Germany to writing novels and making films (by the way, a number of scenes are set in Hartley’s real office in New York, where he owns Possible Films). In this story, everything is possible, any turn is possible, no dramatic rules seem to exist. Meanwhile, it is not so much a method of designating the simultaneity of events occurring as a principle open to outsiders and even casual observations, as if a relaxed narrative about everything at once and about nothing at all.
Another thing is that the 52-year-old director doesn't feel as brash and sarcastic as he did at the beginning of his film career. After all, through is a tangential path, something hasty and superficial. So in the final Hal Hartley seems to be afraid to put a bold point or exclamation point, preferring an ellipsis - or rather, giving two outcomes of one event. It looks a little naive and comical.