Taglines: Accountancy, Murder, Amnesia, Torture, Ecstasy, Understanding, Redemption
Amateur movie storyline. Isabelle is an ex-nun waiting for her special mission from God. In the meantime, she is making a living writing pornography. She meets Thomas, a sweet, confused amnesiac who cannot remember that he used to be a vicious pornographer, responsible for turning his young wife, Sofia, into the world’s most notorious porn queen. Sofia’s on the run, convinced she’s killed him. Together, Isabelle and Thomas set out to discover his past, a past waiting to catch up with him.
Amateur is a 1994 comedy crime drama film written and directed by Hal Hartley starring Isabelle Huppert, Martin Donovan, Elina Löwensohn, Damian Young, Chuck Montgomery, Pamela Stewart, Erica Gimpel, Jan Leslie Harding and Terry Alexander.
Film Review for Amateur
Like other actresses associated with the work of a particular director, the women in Hal Hartley’s films seem to share a family resemblance on screen. Think of Mia Farrow and Diane Keaton before the lens of Woody Allen or Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson vis-a-vis Ingmar Bergman. If Mr. Allen’s women are high-strung and Mr. Bergman’s ripe, Mr. Hartley’s are beautiful but elusive, curiously self-contained. They avoid the camera’s eye. They move as if through water. They may be seething inside, but on the surface they are composed.
Mr. Hartley is no ordinary film maker. His timing is offbeat, his narratives off center. He often directs his actors as precisely as if he were choreographing them, down to the tilt of their head and the angle of their gaze. His protagonists are as likely to be women as men. And while the men are often furiously driven by sorrow, anger or lust, the women are frequently cool and preoccupied, and always intelligent.
The main acting credits for his films read like guest lists for a series of intimate dinners, introducing new names slowly and always putting them together with old ones — a kind of Hartley film family of which the actresses Karen Sillas, Elina Lowensohn and Adrienne Shelly are members. And now the fair, fine-boned French actress Isabelle Huppert can be seen in the director’s fourth feature film, “Amateur,” which opened on Friday.
Mr. Hartley, a native of Lindenhurst, on Long Island, graduated from the State University of New York at Purchase. It is through Purchase that he discovered Ms. Sillas and Ms. Lowensohn, who appear in his coming project “Flirt.” (Parker Posey, another Purchase connection, has a leading role in “Flirt.”)
He himself attributes any on-screen similarities among his actresses to his own obsessions: his consistent interest in certain kinds of women and certain kinds of lives. But he agrees that his screen women have more complexity than most. “Characters are interesting when they have their own agendas,” he said, “as well as wanting to kind of let down some resistance and share their lives.” This, indeed, is what Ms. Sillas, Ms. Lowensohn, Ms. Shelly and, most recently, Ms. Huppert do in his films. Karen Sillas: Strong, Silent Type?
“That familial thing” is the way that Karen Sillas (pronounced SIGH-las) refers to the revolving company of actors and crew that surround Mr. Hartley. “That’s a wonderful place for an actor to live.”
Earthy and astute, with strong Scandinavian features, Ms. Sillas goes back the farthest with the director. Now 31, she was 17 when they met at the college at Purchase. There, in 1985, Mr. Hartley cast her in a film he wrote called “Kid.” Six years later she made her professional film debut in his second feature, “Trust.”
Ms. Sillas went on to earn plaudits for her performance as Jackie, a lonely, emotionally volatile woman in last year’s film by Tom Noonan, “What Happened Was. . . . ” (Ms. Sillas helped shape the role of Jackie in a workshop production by the Paradise Theater Company, in Manhattan, on which the film was based.) Her portrayal, seen by producers at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1994, won her her own CBS television series last fall, “Under Suspicion.” In the show she plays Rose (Phil) Phillips, a no-nonsense police detective on an otherwise all-male squad.
“Hal called a few weeks ago to say he’s really proud of me,” Ms. Sillas said recently by phone from Oregon. This past year Ms. Sillas, a Brooklyn-bred and still Brooklyn-based actress who is divorced, has been living in a rented farmhouse outside Portland while filming the television show.
Her most substantial work for Mr. Hartley — playing Kate, the reclusive owner of a seaside inn, in the 1992 dark comedy “Simple Men” — came about accidentally. Filming had started with another actress in the role, but the casting was a problem. “It was a crisis situation,” Mr. Hartley recalled recently over lunch in downtown Manhattan, near his home. “Then somebody on the crew who was at school with us said, ‘Where’s Karen?’ We called Brooklyn, and there she was.”
The director said he had two chief requirements when casting an actress: she must be good, and she must fit what he needs for the character. But there is evidently a lot of give in the latter requirement. “Karen was very different from what I had written,” Mr. Hartley explained. “I was writing a character who was extremely vulnerable and fought to be strong, whereas Karen is strong. Her vulnerabilities are what become apparent” as the story unfolds, he said. “I thought that was much more interesting.”
Ms. Sillas is a bit amused by Mr. Hartley’s perception of her as the strong, silent type. While she acknowledged an intrinsic quality of strength, she recalled sitting in a coffee shop with the director years back as he described the role of Nurse Paine, which he had just written for her in “Trust.” “A soldier of a woman, harsh, a kind of pioneer,” he had said.
“Oh, honey,” Ms. Sillas remembered responding, “you really don’t know me, do you?” Even now, she went on, “his interpretation of me is that masked, independent kind of woman. The vulnerabilities, the questions, the fears — those he prefers to have going on like a storm under the surface.” Elina Lowensohn: Seeking Tranquillity
“Everything passes: success, fame, beauty,” Elina Lowensohn, 28, said recently from her New York apartment. Ms. Lowensohn, a small, dark actress, believes that what endures is “the work on the mind.” A practitioner of Buddhist meditation, Ms. Lowensohn will occasionally spend 10 days meditating in silence. For her, acting is merely another way of “searching” the inner world.
Born in Romania, she left her homeland at 14, when her mother defected to spare her children a life under Communism. After dropping out of New York University’s drama department, the actress came to Mr. Hartley’s attention through Purchase connections: one of the film maker’s former teachers there, Travis Preston, had directed her in “Hamlet” and “The Ghost Sonata” in New York.
Mr. Hartley went to see Ms. Lowensohn perform and was impressed by her work. In 1991 he cast her in his short film “Theory of Achievement,” and he cast her again, as an epileptic revolutionary, in “Simple Men.”
Ms. Lowensohn, too, had a considerable impact on her role. In “Simple Men” she portrayed a passionate radical; Mr. Hartley asked her if he could name the character Elina — she said yes — and borrowed the actress’s “foreignness,” her “vulnerability and strengths,” to flesh out the part.
Ms. Lowensohn has since had a small but vivid role in the film “Schindler’s List,” playing the engineer who is shot after warning that a building at a Nazi camp will collapse if the foundation is not rebuilt. And recently she played the title role in a cable television film of Willa Cather’s “My Antonia.”
Now in “Amateur,” Mr. Hartley’s fourth feature film, Ms. Lowensohn portrays Sofia, a former pornographic star trying to start a new life — a “totally convincing” transformation, wrote Caryn James in The New York Times.
Ms. Lowensohn also speaks gratefully of the “family atmosphere” on Mr. Hartley’s set. But theater work remains important to her. This summer she will travel to Paris to play Karen in a stage version of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.” She is currently in Bernard-Marie Koltes’s “Roberto Zucco,” which is being directed by Mr. Preston, at the Cucaracha Theater, in Manhattan. Adrienne Shelly: Acting as Day Job
Adrienne Shelly, too, continues to work on stage between films, and the Cucaracha is where she just finished playing the title role of a performance artist in “Budd,” written and directed by Richard Caliban. (Though they have not worked together in a film, Ms. Shelly, also 28, and Ms. Lowensohn have acted together on stage and are close friends. “We call each other ‘sister,’ ” Ms. Shelly said.)
Ms. Shelly, a honey blonde, had just left Boston University, where she majored in film, before coming to New York and meeting Mr. Hartley. She began her film career with the director in 1990, when she starred as a high-school senior obsessed with nuclear annihilation in his first feature, “The Unbelievable Truth.” She had met Mr. Hartley after submitting her resume and photos to a producer casting a music video. Someone brought her photographs to Mr. Hartley, who was casting his film in the next office. She was obviously wrong for the role. “I needed a young woman who’s a model,” he said. “Adrienne’s way too short.” Ms. Shelly gives her height as “6’1 1/2″ minus exactly 1 foot.”
“But I saw her and just kind of got knocked out,” said the director. Ms. Shelly’s striking features combine little-girl innocence with womanly sensuality. “I said, ‘Wow, she’s interesting and pretty.’ She was also the best actress.”
After “The Unbelievable Truth” Mr. Hartley wrote the leading role of Maria, a pregnant teen-ager, in “Trust” for Ms. Shelly. Ms. Shelly, who has appeared in low-budget features like “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me” and “Hexed,” does not entirely enjoy acting and has come to think of it as her day job, the work she does to support her real interests: writing and directing for stage and film. She recently finished the screenplay for a movie called “Sudden Manhattan” — “about a woman who’s not quite sure if she’s losing her mind or modern Manhattan life is really getting to her,” Ms. Shelly said. The screenplay has attracted the interest of several production companies.
Does she feel she is part of a film family centered around Mr. Hartley? “Honestly,” Ms. Shelly said, exasperated, “I was asked to do a piece in The London Times about belonging to the ‘Hartley stable’ of actors. It was put to me just like that! I said, ‘Neigh.’ ” But a moment later she added: “I feel lucky to be able to work with a bunch of people I unilaterally respect and admire. And sure, Hal is at the center of that. But it’s not so limiting.” Isabelle Huppert: An Imported Star
In “Amateur” Isabelle Huppert is a nymphomaniacal but virginal ex-nun who comes to the aid of an amnesiac with a troubled past. As different as Ms. Huppert seems from the director’s other leading actresses — she is 39 and the first celebrity he has ever cast — she has actually been a distant relative of Mr. Hartley’s film family for years. Since he started making movies, he has required his actresses to study her work.
“Good film actresses,” he said, “it’s all about tension. They want to feel, they want to emote, but they’re up against a medium that’s essentially a machine. Isabelle understands that very well.”
Several years ago Ms. Huppert, who has played leading roles in films like “Coup de Torchon,” “Heaven’s Gate” and “Madame Bovary,” wrote to Mr. Hartley to say she admired his pictures and would like to work with him. Delighted, he created the part of Isabelle in “Amateur” for her.
“I was really touched when I read the script,” Ms. Huppert said by phone from Strasbourg, where she was performing in the monologue version of Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando,” directed by Robert Wilson. “Hal has a very broad imagination, yet he’s able to write a character only one person could play.”
Despite their limited interaction beforehand, “from the moment I stepped on his set, I felt I was at home,” she added.
Amateur (1995)
Directed by: Hal Hartley
Starring: Isabelle Huppert, Martin Donovan, Elina Löwensohn, Damian Young, Chuck Montgomery, Pamela Stewart, Erica Gimpel, Jan Leslie Harding, Terry Alexander
Screenplay by: Hal Hartley
Production Design by: Steve Rosenzweig
Cinematography by: Michael Alan Spiller
Film Editing by: Steve Hamilton
Costume Design by: Alexandra Welker
Set Decoration by: Jennifer Baime, Amy Tapper
Art Direction by: Ginger Tougas
Music by: Hal Hartley, Jeffrey Taylor
MPAA Rating: R for violence and language.
Distributed by: Sony Pictures Classics
Release Date: May 19, 1995
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