It was just after reading Paul Harrill’s thoughts on the differences between high-definition video and film that Hal Hartley’s latest film, Girl From Monday, popped up in my Netflix queue. More than anything I’ve seen so far (admittedly limited in scope), it suggests both the expressive highs and the potential to annoy of small-scale HD video aesthetics. The Pinocchio Theory describes the film’s style better than I could:
The Girl From Monday was evidently made on an extremely low budget, and shot on digital video. In this respect, it somewhat resembles Hartley’s pre-millennium short The Book of Life, with which it shares many stylistic traits, notably the exploitation of the video for stop action, strange light diffusion, motion blur, and so on. The Girl From Monday adds to this mix desaturation (so that scenes shot in color look washed out, almost black and white) and lots of jump cuts and unexpected close-ups. The result is a film that is gorgeous in its relentlessly kinetic and fractured cinematography, although (or precisely because) its spare look is diametrically opposed to the photographic lushness that is commonly described as “gorgeous.”
First, the annoying part. Stop action is fine, but motion blur really, really strains the eye. Particularly if your whole movie uses it. At worst, I felt like I was being subjected to some Munsterbergian persistance of vision experiment. (Oddly enough, if you fastforward the DVD, the motion is smooth, not jerky at all). At best, the video effects came across as cheap and gimmicky.
Source: Possible Films
But the cinematography was another matter: it is gorgeous. The color tones Hartley achieves are amazing and not at all like the blue-heavy palate so dominant in higher-production-values features today. Actually, I didn’t find the camerawork fractured so much as a return to composed, analytical editing that actually breaks down the narrative space and doesn’t feel like it has to show the entire action all at once, from a faux-objective vantage. I’ve complained before about the tableau addiction among American independent filmmakers today, a formulaic reliance on the long take and the static long shot. The Girl from Monday is as fresh an antidote as I could hope for. It didn’t look like everything else, and I appreciated the film for it.
The narrative? It’s set in a future New York where some faceless marketing corporation has taken over and established a dictatorship based on consumerism. The plot hinges on an effort to put Coke machines in schools. It’s a bit absurd and not always in that Hal Hartley theatre of the absurd sort of way. There was only one of those quintessential Hartley moments that made me guffaw like I used to watching his films (a shootout scene in the school cafeteria). Since Henry Fool at least, the balance in tone between serious and comic, pensive and absurd, hasn’t quite gelled, perhaps because Hartley has tried to push his formula a bit. The saving grace was the presence and pitch perfection of Sabrina Lloyd, who I’ve liked since her sojourn on Sports Night.
So in sum: a failed experiment that reminds us how welcome failed experiments can be in a marketplace of predictable and aesthetically safe. It’s a sad commentary that the film could get no theatrical distribution, relying instead on Netflix as its video distributor. I mean, it’s Hal friggin’ Hartley we’re talking about, not some unknown rookie filmmaker.
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