Clever `Flirt' Tells One Story Three Different Ways

November 08, 1996|By Michael Wilmington, Tribune Movie Critic.

Hal Hartley's "Flirt" is based on one of those ingenious movie narrative notions -- like the multiple perspective stories of "Citizen Kane" or "Rashomon" -- that seem so logical when you finally see them, you wonder why so few people tried them before. (The answer, of course, is that the ideas seem logical only after you've seen how well they can work.)

Hartley has essentially taken the same script, the same lines and situations, and repeated them three times, in completely different environments and cities, with different casts. The first version of his thrice-told story -- in which, each time, an irresponsible flirt involved in several affairs or near-affairs receives a comeuppance -- is set in Manhattan and the next two in Berlin and Tokyo.

In all three versions, the milieu is fairly arty-intellectual, and the speeches remain essentially the same, except for three similar interludes in which figures from outside that milieu -- workers, jailbirds, restroom occupants -- act as a kind of Greek chorus, commenting on what's been happening.

Hartley does more than use new casts and cities. Each time out, there's a gender and racial switch. Flirt No. 1, Bill (played by Bill Sage), is a white heterosexual male with a reckless boyish look. Flirt No. 2, Dwight (Dwight Ewell), is a narcissistic gay African-American male in leather pants, and Flirt No. 3, Miho (Miho Nikaidoh), is a diminutive Japanese woman with a haunting gaze.

The central situation keeps recurring. The flirt and a current lover -- who is also involved with someone else -- are about to separate. After a heated exchange about commitments, the flirt wanders the streets, flirts with a stranger and then meets an acquaintance and discusses an erotic tangle in which they find themselves.

Someone who wrongly suspects the flirt of seducing his/her spouse -- New York's Walter (Martin Donovan), Berlin's Greta (Geno Lechner) and Tokyo's Uki (Chiako Hara) -- then desperately confronts them. A gun is involved; violence results. There are three separate hospital scenes and three subtly different resolutions.

The effect is both odd and exciting. As soon as you realize what writer-director Hartley is doing -- when you notice the virtual replay of the same scenario in parts one and two, you begin anticipating the lines and wondering what alterations -- emotional, cultural and psychological -- will be generated by the new settings.

Hartley throws another element into his Tokyo story: He keeps the lines and situations but alters the order in which we see some of the events.

By the end of the movie, Hartley has deftly shown us that -- eternal and changeless as some basic human situations and conflicts may seem to be -- they're never the same, no matter how many times they're repeated. And he's also shown us how much more important images and actions can be in a film than mere words: how interpretation always changes the essence of a script.

The whole movie, in a way, is about improvising in different contexts. And that's what a flirt or seducer is always doing: playing the same role with a changing cast of partners.

Does all this sound academic? It doesn't play that way -- even though Hartley is one director who makes films deliberately for intellectual audiences. A darling of film festival juries and critics since his second feature, "Trust" (1991), Hartley has never quite broken out like fest veterans Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino or Ed Burns. He remains, like Jim Jarmusch ("Stranger Than Paradise," "Dead Man"), a respected figure whose films are a puzzlement to the mainstream.

Hartley and his wonderful cinematographer, Michael Spiller, keep showing us the same slightly screwy landscapes, alienated communities and opaque, attractive characters, the same absurdist conversations, the same echoes of French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard (with his French coffee shop lyricism and deadpan visual games).

Yet Hartley's movies reverberate in your mind long after you see them. I liked "Flirt" better than any of Hartley's films since "Trust." The playfulness he shows here seems better integrated, more meaningful, than the strange narrative whimsies of 1992's "Simple Men" or 1994's "Amateur." Perhaps it's also truer to Hartley's personality. In any case, audiences looking for something different and smart will definitely find it in "Flirt."


(star) (star) (star)

Directed and written by Hal Hartley; photographed by Michael Spiller; edited by Steve Hamilton; production designed by Steven Rosenzweig (New York), Ric Schachtebeck (Berlin), Tomuyuki Maruo (Tokyo); music by Ned Rifle, Jeff Taylor; produced by Ted Hope. In English, German and Japanese, with English subtitles. A Cinepix Film Properties release; opens Friday at the Music Box. Running time: 1:35. No MPAA rating. Adult. Language, sensuality, nudity, violence.







