Hal Hartley is a quirky but genuine talent who has made his mark as an award-winning independent filmmaker. His films are modestly scaled, seriocomic portraits of chance encounters between disparate outsiders--characters who typically engage in elliptical exchanges, debating everything from philosophical issues to the workings of internal combustion engines, but don't always learn anything from their discourses or their adventures. Hartley's deft, offbeat comedy is highlighted by circuitous, layered bantering, with punchlines coming late, if at all. The visual correlatives to this non sequitur-laden wit have ranged from a shot of a nun wrestling a policeman to the ground to a camera pan which reveals heavy metal "soundtrack" music to be emanating from the electric guitar of a minor character. Hartley's deadpan, episodic narrative style would seem to betray the influence of Jean-Luc Godard, though his camera is less experimental, his comedy more assimilable and his politics less overt.

Hartley's gallery of indecisive but intelligent characters includes an ex-convict who sets the town talking about what his crime might have been ("The Unbelievable Truth" 1989); a literature professor who spends most of a semester on one paragraph of Dostoyevsky (the PBS project "Surviving Desire" 1992); a manic, bitter electronics whiz who carries a hand-grenade in his pocket ("Trust" 1990); two very different brothers who search for their long-missing radical father ("Simple Men" 1992); and an amnesiac who enlists the aid of a former nun to help him discover his past ("Amateur" 1994).

Some critics have accused the director of making the same film again and again. With "Flirt" (1995), he did just that, depicting three love stories (including one homosexual) utilizing the same dialogue and structure. Moving from New York to Berlin to Tokyo, Hartley examines the essence of love refracted through different characters with ultimately the same results. A flirtatious lover brings about the destruction of his or her own beauty. "Henry Fool" (1997) has been lauded as his best film to date, reiterating his themes of reinvention and the serendipitous experiences that reconstitute relationships.