The film-makers have been saved by Fox’s marvellously intuitive performance, which makes much of little. More crucially, for me, the film was surprisingly unfunny, the humour often not so much black as invisible. We could h ave done with the aphoristic wit that grounded the cynicism of Billy Wilder’s scripts. Shallow Grave’s model is clearly the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple, and you can hear echoes of Barton Fink (in Eccleston’s listless response to police questioning) and M iller’s Crossing (in the haunting wasteland where the body is buried). The Coen way is an exciting route to ride, though also rather an arid one. At least Shallow Grave brings a new, American-style energy to British film-making.
It may not be the answer to our industry’s prayers, but it is a good start.Ironically, this success will bring Boyle, Hodge and their talented young producer, Andrew Macdonald, their own temptation. They can expect soon to wake up to find a suitcase of dollars in their spare room, left there by that old corpse called Hollywood.Somewhere out there, at an oblique angle to the real world, stands Hal Hartley, philosopher king of his own pained and drolly ironic universe. In Hartley’s new movie, Amateur (15), the ideas are bolder and the comedy broader than ever before The plot sounds like a joke – and is partly. It’s the one about the virginal nymphomaniac former nun (Isabelle Huppert) who befriends a caring sort of chap (Martin Donovan) who, after a bang on the head, has forgotten that he is a vicious gangster. There’s also a porn star (Elina Lowensohn) whom the nun claims she has had a sign from the Virgin Mary to save Religion ends up scrapping it out with the underworld. It’s a sort of Reservoir Dog-collars.For all the appearance of farce, this is a beautifully precise essay on personality, and its relation to experience. Are we merely the sum of what we do and what befalls us, or is there some non- empirical basis to our selves? The question takes on a particular fascination with regard to Donovan’s amnesiac, who has forgotten his heinous past.
Detached by his forgetfulness from his crimes, he lives a decent life. Is amnesia then a form of absolution, purifying the soul as it blanks the memory? Donovan’s dilemma is reflected in that of Huppert, finding its wittiest expression when Donovan asks how she can be a nymphomaniac if she’s never had sex. She replies: “I’m choosy.” That is not a paradox but an insight: our identity is not entirely bound up in ouractions. This idea ties up with a network of questions that Hartley is asking about the relation of language to the world, how words correspond to the objects they describe. He is also developing his own theory of knowledge: finally asking what it takesto know a person – and witholding his answer until the film’s final line.If all this sounds abstruse, rest assured that Amateur is also highly entertaining.
