The Girl From Monday

The Girl From Monday
Runs Fri., April 22–Wed., May 4, at Northwest Film Forum

If you thought writer-director Hal Hartley was a bit wan, twee, and peculiar before, you ain't seen nothing yet. His signature micro-hits (Amateur, Henry Fool) declared independence from the normal movie universe; his new faux sci-fi flick, here making its world premiere, declares independence from normal Hal Hartley films. Shot on video by cinematographer Sarah Cawley-Cabiya, it exults in the shimmery imperfection of the medium.

When Brazilian model Tatiana Abracos, playing a bodiless alien from the constellation Monday, assumes human form and drops naked into Earth's ocean one day, her pretty underwater writhings kick up a beautiful profusion of elongated bubbles that dance like translucent choreographed sea worms. Even in air, people make cool-looking smears whenever they move, especially if they're storm troopers with shiny metal helmets that catch reflections and emit light from a fascist cyclopean visor over their eyes.

The storm troopers are out to enforce the eccentric sexual laws of dystopian futuristic Manhattan. Only hard-core insurgents have sex for fun. Good citizens have sex to increase their value on the sex stock exchange, monitored by the government. Citizens' prime duty is to consume products, especially one another. So when a good girl like Cecile (Sabrina Lloyd) gets propositioned by ad-agency colleague Jack (Bill Sage), she's alarmed—because he chickens out, potentially lowering her sex credit rating.

Jack is an alien, too, given human form to run the sex insurgency. The Brazilian model alien lives at his house, à la Splash, learning how to occupy a human body. He teaches her to drink and pee. Then he's off to the office to create ad campaigns manipulating schoolkids into consuming soda, and make secret cell phone calls to his fun-sex commando, Lt. William (Leo Fitzpatrick of Kids). Cecile converts to the fun-sex cause.

Despite more voice-overs than Sin City, the logic of all this intrigue eludes us. His sci-fi sex film is low on science, fiction, and sex. At least Sage has the excuse of being an alien, explaining this typical Hartley hero's baffled blankness. Hartley fans will get their minimum daily requirement of irony from the satire—they'll call this a hip comedy. This onetime Hartley fan is reconsidering his allegiance, as he retreats into ever chillier interstellar wastes of vacuous abstraction. I like the fresh direct-video look, though. And maybe when Hartley appears in person at 8 p.m. Friday, April 29, he can explain why he felt his previous film style wasn't weird and remote enough. (NR) TIM APPELO

Hard Goodbyes: My Father
Runs Fri., April 22–Thurs., April 28, at Grand Illusion

On the eve of the moonwalk in 1969, Elias (Giorgos Karayannis), a 10-year-old Athenian schoolboy, half lives in space already, with the help of his loving father, Christos (Stelios Mainas), who reads him Jules Verne's Mysterious Island by the glow of a flashlight, making it seem even more secret and forbidden. They have a solemn pact: His father will absolutely be home to watch the moonwalk on television with Elias.

Christos is an earnestly hardworking failure, generally on the road selling electronics from the back of the family sedan. His ties to Elias may be all he has left; his rail-thin wife (Joanna Tsigouli, called only Mom) is eaten up with fury over the splintering of their family life, while his other son, 16-year-old Ari, has already taken on some of his mother's desperate disdain for this mostly disappeared breadwinner.

Christos ritually announces his late-night arrival home with a big, blue-wrapped chocolate bar, tossed on the bed for Elias to find in the morning. His scant time with the boy is spent in the kind of deviltry that makes mothers faint and sons' eyes widen: driving the old car in endless circles along the white seacoast, dad steering with his feet, while he and Elias each perch outside their windows.

Each of these details reinforces the staggering emptiness Elias feels when a road accident obliterates his father from their lives, leaving only Christos' devoted brother and a blind, venomous grandmother, whose special targets are any who try to help her.

The strengths of debuting writer- director Penny Panayotopoulou's film (at SIFF last year) is its clear-eyed, uncloying insight into Elias' mind as he steadfastly refuses to accept his father's death. This is the hallowed territory of My Life as a Dog, and while Hard Goodbyes is a good notch below that, there's something wonderfully knowing about the path Elias takes to slowly slip-slide back into the "real" world: dispensing dozens of his sacred, saved chocolate bars at school as presents from his dad; and faking long, magnificent letters to his awe-inspiring gorgon grandmother from his father. And, best yet, imagining moving into the restored family car, with a flowerpot out one window and the inside of the roof papered with photographs.

Hard Goodbyes is at its most inspired when the camera plays over amazing young Karayannis' face, shining with an agony of pure belief—and in its vivid, dreamlike palette, starry-sky blues, pulsing oranges and yellows. At the end, even Elias' orange tent, glowing against the dark at his uncle's seaside bungalow, is a match for the Apollo 11 liftoff flames, and the moonwalk itself comes with a final, resolving benediction. (NR) SHEILA BENSON