Simple Men
A film by Hal Hartley
Showing at Melbourne's Kino from April 2
Reviewed by Peter Boyle
Independent film maker Hal Hartley has a distinctive style — evident in Simple Men and his 1991 art house cinema success, Trust. His characters are quirky, prone to spout aphorisms, speak to themselves and almost never smile. They are all victims of suburban life, locked in desperate individual struggles to free themselves from its soporific grip by philosophising in the clichés gleaned from mass culture.
Hartley's subject matter is no less than "the meaning of life". He says that every film he makes is "work in progress", a further development on the themes tackled in earlier films. He also tends to work with the same actors. Scenes and characters reappear in new but still recognisable forms. Hartley says this is like a wink to the audience, a way of saying, "Hi, it's me again and we are continuing our research into human beings".
While his black comedy ridicules establishment values and institutions, his main focus is on the relations between individuals. In Trust, for example, two young refugees from oppressive family situations accidentally forge a new and unsentimental relationship based on honesty and trust. But in Simple Men gender conflict bends the plot. The characters, while just as over the top and deadly serious, approach each other with less innocence. Hartley brings them into accidental collision and we watch the results.
Not so simple but good-looking men, Bill and Dennis, are brothers with little in common except for their search for their father (an ageing anarchist from the '60s who is on the run from the law). Bill, the elder brother, smarting after being ditched by his last girlfriend, has vowed revenge on the first good-looking woman he sees. "I'm going to make her fall in love with me", he says, "and then I'm going to fuck her", and then break her heart.
The women they bump into, Kate and Vera, are wary of men. However, the mature, strong-willed and earth-motherly Kate defuses Bill's misogyny and he ends up being a modern sort of "gentleman". But in an interesting twist, Kate responds not by being swept off her feet but in an equally "gentlemanly" way.
Dennis' accidental collision with Vera (a mysterious and beautiful Romanian-born epileptic) promises to be a little more complex because she turns out to be his father's young lover. After some extended hide and seek games, dad materialises, slaps Dennis on the face and says "Hands off my girl" — and that's it! This Oedipal scenario brings on no challenge to the father-son relationship.
Hartley poses the question: Where do respect and trust spring from? While in Trust his answer was unambiguous — don't look where convention tells you to — it is less so in Simple Men. The supposedly "dangerous" Bill turns out to be a nice guy, but an cal love for his father is left powerful but unexplored.
Hartley's style of word play was common enough on the stage, especially in the heyday of the theatre of the absurd. The cross conversations, the "deep" throwaway statements provoked by the most mundane questions, the long faces that overstate the misery of the human condition, began to be imported onto movie screens in the mid-'80s, with limited success. Hartley says that he uses beautiful actors and interesting images and angles to entice his audience to follow the reflective dialogue. Still Simple Men, while entertaining, requires considerable effort even from audiences with a taste for wordy films and plays.
Hartley is to be admired for searching for an alternative to the mushy sentimentality peddled by the mass media. But his apparent determination to solve the "meaning of life" riddle with new platitudes about love, respect and trust (making the world tolerable, if not go around) reflects the prevailing pessimism of the 1990s and perhaps the creeping reassertion of conservative values challenged in the 1960s. Hartley's next "work in progress" should be interesting.
Hal Hartley will tour Australia in April to promote Simple Men.