First thing to say: this is one load of primary bollocks. Which is nothing unsual for a Hal Hartley film.
Simon Grim is a stick-thin bespectacled garbage collector. Who also happens to be a Nobel Prize winning poet in the making. Which is where Henry Fool comes in. To make him.
Henry Fool is not a Nobel Prize winning writer. Although he want to be. Or thinks he already is.
Simon Grim has a slutty sister called Faye. She wants to be fucked. Often. She’s got her slutty eye on Henry. But the Fool fucks catatonic mom on the sofa instead.
Henry Fool wears a 3-piece charcoal suit, has foppish locks, talks in sonorous tones like a academic of Literary Theory: “The relativity of cadence in relationship to the readability of form” he opines. But he looks like a thuggish street-dealer. And goes around impregnating various fawning females. “Beast! Fiend! Rapist!” He fucks Faye eventually. Gives her is progeny.
Henry has jumped parole. “What did you do?” asks Simon. “I got caught” says Henry. Got caught screwing a 13 year old girl. Got 7 years. So, not a literary genius – a paedophile.
Mom is playing piano. “That was nice”. “Yes, it was nice – but it was unmemorable” “Does that matter?” “Yes it does”. Mom puts down piano lid. She reads Simons pornographic poem. Slits her wrists. That was memorable enough.
Simon gets his poem published. Becomes a literary sensation. Becomes feted, awarded, rewarded. Becomes the famously respected genius Henry Fool will never be. Henry Fool is just a schmuck. Just a notoriety. Just a kiddie-fucker. A good for nothing drunk. A deluded pretentious twat.
On the scale of pretentious twatism this film wins hands down.
All the characters seem like they’re seriously disassociated from the normal range of human feeling. Like they might be suffering from mild to severe variations of Aspergers syndrome.
I used to be more tolerant, even indulgent, of this po-mo kind of stuff 20 years ago.
But not anymore.
Dir: Hal Hartley, USA
5/10
