The Girl from Monday (2005)

Well below par for Hartley

I used to really enjoy writer/director Hal Hartley's work. For my taste, though, he peaked with 1992's Simple Men. Flirt and Amateur were as pale imitations of his masterwork, and No Such Thing isn't worth mentioning. Although The Girl From Monday is credited as "A Science Fiction by Hal Hartley," it's still more indie than sci-fi. And that's just the final straw in a long series of missteps.

It's beautifully shot, and I have to give the guy credit for making an ambitious movie on digital video, but there seems to be no narrative thread apart from The Girl, who shows up at the beginning and leaves at the end. There's been some sort of consumer revolution that has allowed the virtual takeover of society by a media conglomerate, and Jack (Bill Sage) is the increasingly remorseful architect of that revolution.

A major component of the new system is the trading of "personal value" on the stock exchange. When two people consent to have sex, their personal value increases. (Sex without value increase is criminal.) Hartley dances around the "sex as value" concept quite a bit, but never really makes it stick. Hell, even the ham-handed Saturn 3 used a variation more effectively:

James: Yes, you have a nice body. May I use it?
Alex: I'm with the Major.
James: For his personal consumption only? That's penally unsocial on Earth.

Unfortunately, because we never get emotionally attached to The Girl, when the greedy (his word) Principal Funk cuts a deal with her to use her body to increase his personal value, this outrageous violation barely registers.

There's nothing wrong with making a science fiction movie on a budget (see Primer--and then see it again), but a couple of black-clad corporate "soldiers" with cheesy B-movie helmets, Super Soakers and a black Hummer are not enough to set the proper tone for a futuristic or even an alternate-reality movie. Gattaca was by no means a big-budget movie, but it set the bar pretty high with its subtle retro-future styling.

Hartley's evident intent was to make a statement about the overbranding of America, but he seems to have missed the idea of visibility. While it's often more effective to keep the monster hidden in a horror movie, here that technique doesn't work. In 1984, Big Brother is omnipresent and ever-threatening. In the Alien movies, "The Company" is practically a character itself. In our society, how are we kept constantly aware of such corporate giants as, say, Nike? Branding. And in life, as well as in film, branding means logos.

The interactive advertising (and blatant product placement) of Spielberg's Minority Report makes the point spectacularly; Alex Cox's Repo Man takes it to the opposite extreme with its ubiquitous generic products. Yet in Monday, there's nary a logo to be seen. Instead, characters continually tell us about the Big Brother-like multimedia giant, Triple M--an egregious violation of the "show, don't tell" rule of filmmaking. All he really needed to do was hire a graphic artist and take a trip to Kinko's.

The best part of the DVD for me was the "making of" featurette. It was consistently entertaining (I especially appreciated hearing Hartley refer to himself as a "craftsman" rather than an "artist") and it was instructive to see how much Hartley does with so little. Unfortunately, the movie itself didn't live up to the potential displayed in the featurette.

Which is not to say that I hated it, but it could have been so much more. But you know what? Hal Hartley doesn't make movies for me; he makes them for Hal Hartley. And even if we don't always connect, I'll always respect him for following his own vision. November 6, 2008

Some special effects please

A bit cerebral, most viewers will likely need to watch it more than once to pick up the subtle nuances Hal Hartley likes to interject in his movies. Still, more or less an interesting story line that tickles the curiosity whether or not aliens from distant planets could live among us, and if they do/did, would the majority of us be able to recognize them? Being a fan of good special effects in scifi, the low budget character of this film almost ruined it for me; however, you can rely on the charisma/talent of Sabrina Lloyd here to raise it well into the realms of the watchable again. July 2, 2008

Hal Hartley slightly missteps, but nails the times

Part of the problem of being a conceptual film maker, is that your work is essentially an essay. Each piece is about something, and Hartley's back catalog is deep and great. Since Henry Fool (probably his best film) he's moved into digital cinema to cut costs. His first all digital piece The Book of Life was awful and probably his worst film, but he followed it up with No Such Thing which was a big budget film that never made it major theaters. No Such Thing suceeded, but showed that when Hartley is risking more, he puts more into the film. The Girl From Monday is Hartley's second digital release, made on a shoe string budget, but unlike The Book of Life it succeeds where the former fails. Hartley drops us into a dystopian future that essentially is the present. His characters don't exercise control by robotics or some other technology, but simply through libertarian principles taken to their extreme, neuro-economics, and the logic of commodities. In essence, they're an advertising company that commodifies sex into The Rebel Sell. Sex becomes a subsidy for competitive consumption.

The Girl From Monday's only major flaw (like a lot of independent pictures) is a little to much white space. We're at times given long semi-epic moments of solitutude to further reinforce the hopelessness of the protoganist's situation. While Henry Fool or no such featured such moments, they occur as background around the events and ideas of the film, here they take center stage similar to the desolation in Shinji Aoyama's films. The other problem is that it's digital, while Hartley's other films are beautiful, at times The Girl From Monday's low budget comes through, and despite the poignancy of the ideas behind it, it doesn't feel as complicated in it's consideration of the point as say Hartley's other work does. In other words, it's provocative, but the film doesn't ponder its points to their full ruminations. It could have been an even shorter film, or it could have been fleshed out with out as many pauses. But at 9 USD it seems priced about right, and for the amount of thought it will give you, it's worth a lot more than that. You'll probably find yourself handing it off to other people, hoping they view it too. April 28, 2008

WHAT WAS HAL THINKING?

ALTHOUGH A HAL HARTLY FAN.... I DIDN'T GET IT ?
TOO DEEP OR OVER MY HEAD MAYBE? I JUST DIDNT LIKE IT AS MUCH AS HIS PAST WORKS! MAYBE SIFI JUST ISN'T HAL'S BAG? July 9, 2007

eerie

the story is gripping, eerie and relevant, the filming and acting are brilliant, hal hartley at his best June 27, 2007

More reviews at Amazon.com ...