FREE ON YOUTUBE Hal Hartley - Simple Men

FREE ON YOUTUBE (DU FINDEST DEN GANZEN FILM FREI AUF YOUTUBE) New Yorker Hal Hartley is certainly a pioneer of independent film and of course his style, his camera work, can be considered unique. You can read a lot about it in various indie organs. But what about his stories themselves? How serious can we take them at all? In Hartley's films, extraordinary things happen to ordinary people. From this he forms dry melodramas. Or comedies? Hartley characters are cool. That is, they wouldn't ask themselves or us to take what's happening too seriously. There is even the impression that they are reluctant to appear in a movie. As if Hartley were disturbing her private sphere. Hartley shows all this through the filter of gentle irony. In elegant picture compositions. And so there is an upright mood, sometimes funny (although you never get the impression that one of the characters is aware that something is supposed to be funny here), sometimes even a bit gloomy. Simple Men starts with a botched robbery. Performance by two brothers: The gangster's name is Bill (Robert Burke). The good brother is Dennis (William Sage). One is dangerous, one harmless. The father of the two has escaped from prison. Somewhere he hides. Somewhere on Long Island. In former times the old man was a "revolutionary" = politically active on the left. So the two brothers buy a ticket to Long Island. At least as far as their finances allow. Then they search for their father and meet all sorts of strange guys. The kind of guys you meet at the gas station or in the street cafe. There are many conversations, many dialogues - which in themselves mean nothing. Sometimes the characters blink. As if all this wasn't serious at all. Is there a "message"? I don't think so. Nobody says what they mean. As I noticed, you are in the middle of a "postmodern" film. This is the kind of film that is released for deconstruction. If you want, you can take the pictures apart. Dissolving like a puzzle. Behind it he may discover something like the Nouvelle Vague. and Hal Hartley? He makes every effort to distance himself from his own film. It's important for him to tell us that his own melodrama doesn't touch him at all. Almost as if his film would sell us for being stupid.