Thrice Upon a Time

FLIRT

by Tom Gunning

“But you know, everyone really only makes one film in his life, and then he breaks it up into fragments and makes it again with just a few little variations each time.” —Jean Renoir

Is it ever possible to repeat oneself perfectly, to re-enact a gesture, a statement, a scene, even a memory, as an exact duplication? The flow of time never cycles back perfectly. The same statement takes on different meanings, an act reverses its effect, and even when history does repeat itself, it changes from tragedy to farce in the rerun.

But what about the cinema? Wasn’t this technology invented so that time could be embalmed, captured once and for all in an endless loop of repetitions and continuous showings? Flirt dis-sects the paradoxes of repetition and transformation, creating a film that is at once an experiment (hence a discovery), a demonstration (hence a proof) and a game (hence an entertainment). Rarely has a filmmaker let us into the processes of inspiration provided by formal choices so candidly. Before our very eyes Hartley shows the way an image and a sound, a character and an environment, a story and a situation, all transform each other through rearrangement and juxtaposition. But Flirt is no class-room lecture, no laboratory distillation. Like all of Hartley’s films, Flirt is filled with passion, humor, regret, mystery and, ultimately, miracle. In Flirt we see how the encounter between a contingent reality and a situation that demands a definite decision gives birth to a film—to three films, in fact, and to one total film, which is these three films interacting and playing together. And the passion and miracle comes from the fact that for Hartley it is not only films that are born from sudden encounters between random acts and final commitments, but love and life itself.

A flirt, Hartley shows us, is a creature who dwells in ambiguity, who skates along the edges of a definition and breathes in the gap between the question and the answer. Hartley’s films are always made up of shots (exquisitely realized by cinematographer Michael Spiller) with well-defined borders, composed within the rather narrow focal plane of a 50mm lens. His dialogue consists of hard-edged witticisms and ironies that circulate from character to character and situation to situation. He is a director of control and precision, a filmmaker who believes (as did Hitchcock, Bresson, and Lubitsch) that there is truly only one proper place in which to put the camera, one viewpoint which reveals the drama. And yet, at the same time, he is also a director who shows how the drama changes, goes out of focus, realigns and redefines itself, when another perfectly precise angle of view is chosen. Hartley defines the borders of his shots in order to let chaos move about freely at the edges. Again and again in a Hartley film violence breaks in from the edge—a sudden punch, a lunging body, a slap—sometimes a kiss. Within the carefully arranged world of witticisms,

precise gestures and choreographed movements, surprise is generated as a repeated line finds a new inflection in an altered context, or the soft focus background action suddenly invades the sharp and clear foreground. Hartley’s order exists in order for the chaos to become incisive and more pointed, as lives are disrupted, families break up and… lovers find each other. Because it is also just beyond the very precisely defined edges of his shots that miracles occur.

All of Hartley’s characters play games, and he, as director, plays along with them. But at turning points the characters discover their games are larger than they thought they were, and not always as amusing, either. No single person can determine the game. Even the rules can change suddenly. The rules simply allow endless variations of play. In Flirt Hartley makes the rules of the game diagrammatically clear for us, the audience, and invites us, as viewers, to play along as we watch. As we note each reoccurrence of dialogue and situation and each rearrangement and new turn in meaning they invoke, we ourselves move through the carefully laid out courses of a Hartley story. From story to story we discover along the way the renewals and transformations that occurred in the pattern. But, remember, these are more than simple diversions and variations. The game opens itself up again to miracles, as, with each reoccurring disfigurement, the flirt encounters new dimensions of both failure and possibility.

Hartley seems to conjugate all the possibilities of flirt, in gender, race and sexual orientation, and the futures glimpsed by each character (as they confront the explosion that occurs between possibility and decision) varies from story to story. In one story an opening can be created in a moment that in the previous story seemed firmly shut down. A line that reeked of aggression in one story becomes tender in the next. An answer given in one story responds to an entirely different question in the stories to follow. The game is a place in which freedom and restrictions, desires and defeats, cowardice and commitment change place and inter-penetrate—eyeing each other, flirting with disaster and with the possibility of true love.

Watching the first two stories, New York and Berlin, we catch on to the carefully structured contrasts. The New York flirt flaunts his sensitivity, yet tries to seduce every girl he meets. The Berlin flirt displays his insouciance, flipping through magazines as people pour out their hearts to him, but also repulses each new come-on as if he were already on the road to commitment. The stakes in the game are raised when the struggle over the handgun switches from a barroom sparring between two males to a domes-tic loft space under the uncomprehending eyes of a small child. The final decisions in each story are unspoken, expressed by frantic action in New York and a strangely calm resignation in Berlin. Yet the final resolution in both stories remains suspended; we must imagine the outcome of each flirt’s next action.

By the time we get to Tokyo, the rules have changed. The game is still going on, many of the pieces seem familiar, but new configurations take place. What is seen and what is spoken get rearranged, as the invisible becomes tangible, the word takes on flesh. Hartley lets us in on this by staging a prologue of sorts, in which we see not only gestures but the director’s hand as well; the process of rehearsal and preparation within the world of professional performers. The players are introduced from the start as part of a grand design as we see them positioned and instructed. The incidents in Tokyo become more public, glimpsed by panicked passersby, even investigated by the police. This is a story with little privacy and with a constant awareness of being witnessed, through a doorway or around a corner. As in a dream (which rearranges the events of a day into unexpected juxtapositions, exposing the tensions hidden beneath the familiarity of everyday life), lines we recognize pop up unexpectedly, scenes are split in two, actions are given to new characters.  Behind it all we sense the urgency of the film itself, finding its way, stumbling into detours, opening up new pathways in the labyrinth of Tokyo streets. Like the reel of the film which in one scene turns in the editor’s hand in the foreground (as we hear lines that were the initiation of the dramas in the previous stories, now muffled and nearly invisible in the background) the movie takes on its own momentum. Each cut seems momentarily to lose the thread, then to rediscover it, woven into an even tighter web.

Like all great storytellers, Hartley traces the exchange of objects and affections. In Flirt we watch guns and film cans and caresses move from hand to hand. In the Tokyo story the shift of objects, lines of dialogue and emotional alliances seems to expand beyond the story structure into a game of urban hide and seek, a cops and lovers quest, whose energy pulses with a growing confidence as it nears the end. Here the visions of the body’s past pleasures (which help the flirt endure the pain of the present as her shattered face is stitched together once again), are shown in images, as if all the words have been exhausted. And this sequence, and the film itself, ends as the flirt nuzzles beside the exhausted film-maker, finding rest and perhaps the trust that makes closeness and wordless gestures possible. The game comes full cycle, from the film’s opening image of rising from the bed in New York City to this weary nap snatched in a dreary waiting room in Tokyo. If by the end we haven’t truly glimpsed the future, we’ve nonetheless cycled through its permutations, arriving at lovers who, miraculously, have met again.

Tom Gunning
1996