Hal Hartley isn't for everyone. He's certainly not going to appeal to the kind of audiences hooked on what Marvel are turning out and even the art-house crowd haven't always related to his brand of very dry, off-the-wall humour and the kind of one-note performances he draws from his casts and yet his reputation has remained rock solid for over thirty years. He made "Amateur" in 1994 with regular co-star Martin Donovan together with Elina Lowensohn and French legend Isabelle Huppert. The plot hardly matters; it's like a riff on the gangster movie but so daft you can discount it as any kind of thriller and too lacking in what we might call 'gags' to be classed as a comedy.
Donovan is the amnesiac who wakes up, injured in an alley, before wandering into a cafe where he meets ex-nun, now porn writer Isabelle Huppert who then brings him home. So far, so regular but from here on it kicks off every which way; they could be making it up as it goes along and maybe they were though Hartley is credited with the screenplay. Of course, there are people who find all of this hilarious and perhaps even intellectually stimulating but it only took about twenty minutes for me to realise that Hartley has never been my kind of poison. For fans only.
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