Fay Grim

I went through a severe Hal Hartley phase my senior year of college, and I still think Henry Fool is one of the best films of the last ten years. It's about a Mephistophelean figure, the titular Henry Fool, who wanders into Woodside, Queens one day to disrupt the mildly retarded-seeming life of a garbageman called Simon Grim. Henry claims to be working on the book of the century — sort of a Tropic of Cancer/Gravity's Rainbow affair, judging by his irritatingly oblique references to what's contained in his stack of marble notebooks. The problem? He's about as talented as anyone claiming to be working on the book of the century would be. Simon, on the other hand, is an epic poet of great promise. Henry nurtures Simon's gift, falls for Simon's sister – the nympho-maniacal Fay, played by Parker Posey – and then commits a crime years later, forcing him to swap identities with Simon (now a reclusive international figure, and recent recipient of the Nobel Prize) and flee the scruffy little burg he washed up in at film's beginning. Got that?

It doesn't matter. Hartley's movies are essentially plotless; what drives his narrative is a rhythmic, outre style of dialogue that, as I type this, I badly want to call "metro-gnomic." Imagine Whit Stillman on acid. At Noah Baumbach's house.

"Look, Simon, I made love to your mother about half an hour ago, and now I'm beginning to think that maybe it wasn't such a good idea." That and a fascist local politician and a few nods to Wordsworth, and before you know it, Camille Paglia's making a cameo as herself, dilating on the merits of pornographic literature, the kind Simon happens to traffic in to ever-widening notoriety.

Hartley's an acquired taste, but it looks as if his long awaited sequel to Henry Fool, Fay Grim, is a tad more accessible. Watch the trailer here.

Good to see Parker Posey back in front of the lens where she belongs. The only discernible bummer is that Thomas Jay Ryan, the actor who played Henry, will only appear at the end of this flick. Ryan was a real discovery, and his performance as a misanthropic anti-genius pretty much made the first film. I ran into him in a Starbucks on Montague Street not too long ago. Nice guy, with a striking resemblance to Lenin if he brought out the Gillette.