Hal Hartley’s Fay Grim comes off like a loopy offspring of Syriana and TV's old I Spy. The actors, including stars Parker Posey and Jeff Goldblum, seem to be living a half second ahead of the rest of the world. Every conversation becomes an arabesque; every other camera angle pulls a Caligari. It's plenty weird and oddly funny. That description suits the director, whose indie suburban dramadies earned him a cult following in the early 1990s.
Fay Grim is a sequel to Hartley's Henry Fool, about a small-town bullshit artist who weaves tales of mad adventures. In Fay, those stories turn out to be true. Henry Fool is, in fact, an international man of mystery now either dead or deep in the underground. His wife Fay (Posey) is recruited by the CIA to find several notebooks of his ultra-secret "confessions." Fay races around Paris and Istanbul, outflanking the lonely spy guys and terrorists, who all fall for her.
A lot of critics trashed Fay and no doubt some Hartley fans felt betrayed by the plunge into espionage. I found it a first-rate guilty pleasure — odd, exotic, and ludicrous. (I have not seen Henry Fool.) In the extras, someone calls it Hartley's The Empire Strikes Back, probably due to its sudden bummer of a cliffhanger ending.
"Wouldn't it be great to have a project that never ends," the director muses in the extras, as if the series could go on for decades.
The overly complex plot (part of the fun), rapid-fire dialogue, dizzying cinematography and Posey's stern but jittery performance make it tough to take in one in-your-face sitting. Plus, it's helpful to rewind here and there, to ensure you've caught this plot point or that. "It's a Hal Hartley bouillabaisse of complication," Goldblum says.
The 17-minute making-of extra is smart and artsy. About half the time is spent talking about Hartley and his precise style of directing, in which the script spells out how actors should move, use their hands — what Hartley calls “the description of activity.”
“I think I get better by exercising that (amount of control),” Hartley says. One of the actors says he finds that micro-direction liberating; others seem not so sure.
Repeating much of the same info as the making-of is a cable show about the film produced by Fay backer HD Net. Images (1.77:1) and audio are okay for government work.
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