The Girl From Monday
Writer/director Hal Hartley's new movie is set in the New York City of the immediate future. The times are Huxleyan (or are they Orwellian? Or Atwoodian?), the government is a consumer dictatorship, and citizens can be traded on the stock exchange. But one man wants to break free, and ''The Girl From Monday" is the numbing story of his adventure.
As Hartley's films go, this one is characteristically idiosyncratic -- the characters speak in corporate jargon, people's sex lives are inextricable from the quality of their credit ratings, Thoreau's ''Walden" is banned, and, by the way, an extraterrestrial has just crashed to earth from a distant constellation called Monday.
Bill Sage plays Jack Bell, a tired-looking, power-brokering advertising executive who helped sweep the company Triple M (the Major Multimedia Monopoly) into power. Now that the corporation has refashioned human existence so that everything is market driven, Bell wants to pull himself out of the equation. He starts a counterrevolution, which he runs surreptitiously. Its followers are called partisans, and its tenets involve such rebellious concepts as pleasure for pleasure's sake.
Acting on his convictions, Jack seduces Cecile (Sabrina Lloyd), a serious, young junior executive. Her eventual belief in the revolution gets her in trouble with the corporate overlords. It also drags the movie into a morass of tepid action that I never found engaging enough to try to understand. And I've never before felt that way about a Hal Hartley film.
Even Hartley's overblown beauty-and-the-beast fairy tale, ''No Such Thing," from 2002, had its intrigue. ''The Girl From Monday" has ideas that don't take off as moviemaking. For example, Hartley tells some of the story through stop-motion photography, which evokes Chris Marker's landmark short film ''La Jetée." It's an allusion that makes you distressingly aware of the artistry that's missing from Hartley's latest movie.
Aside from Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, and the Gus Van Sant of ''Gerry" and ''Elephant," American movies don't have a more iconoclastic filmmaker than Hartley. But since 1998 when he made an international breakthrough with ''Henry Fool," he's become less a gritty fantasist and more an arch literalist. ''The Girl From Monday" is about our current consumer climate. While it has a wily concept, the movie doesn't attempt to be articulate or coherent about what it all means. The resulting film is neither documentary nor parable. (Hartley cheekily calls it science fiction.)
Lately Hartley has been trying digital photography, and the new format might allow him to continue making movies at cut-rate budgets, but the lack of constraint wreaks havoc on his usually hilarious framing and outré choreography. Here he overrelies on canted angles and a bright look that's far more clinical than any of his previous pictures.
The charm, verve, and clearly articulated vision a filmmaker would need to put this over are nowhere in evidence, though Hartley's sentimentality and wan cynicism are on grating display. This picture is neither harrowing nor funny nor illuminating, but it does arouse concern about whether Hartley himself plans ever to return from Monday.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
Video
