Five years after making his delightful first feature film, THE UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH (1989), Hal Hartley wrote and directed this rather inferior film, his fifth feature. This film certainly has excellent acting by Martin Donovan, Elina Löwensohn, and Isabelle Huppert. (Donovan is still working with Hartley, and has just appeared in Hartley's latest film NED RIFLE (2014).) But Hartley does not pull off the extremely unpleasant story about some pretty unpleasant people. He goes for comedic effects including holding shots for long enough for us to laugh (hopefully), but he overdoes it and the whole thing does not work. Nor would one necessarily want to know what happens to those people anyway. And I for one certainly did not want to laugh about it, because they are all so disgusting that it simply is not funny. The film starts off with Martin Donovan lying in an alley in New York City, apparently dead. Elina Löwensohn is scampering around his body anxiously and then runs off in fear. Donovan then wakes up and can remember nothing, not even who he is. So far, so good, a promising start to an amnesia story. But then Hartley has ludicrously created a character played by Huppert who is an ex-nun who has left her convent and engages in sex fantasies, claiming to Donovan (whom she befriends) that she is a nymphomaniac who is also a virgin. So far not so good. It is too silly, and Huppert's gloomy expressions and attempts to make her character convincing by means of enigmatic frowns are not successful. Then we discover that the unknown persona of Donovan is not Mr. Nice Guy suffering from memory loss, as we have been led to believe, but instead a Mr. Extremely Nasty who murders and maims people and is involved in prostitution rackets. Charming! So we have a violent nutter who is mixed up with a pious nutter and also with a pornography star who is also a nutter, played by the always-intriguing and alluring Löwensohn whose talents are utterly wasted here. And it is all such a waste of time. Hartley should have torn up the hopeless script and written something worthwhile, but instead he went ahead and shot the damned thing. If we are meant to see anything profound in the resulting mess, I have yet to detect it. Time to move on.
Review of Amateur
