Amazon.com video review:
Hal Hartley's three-part film about desire
and commitment has an interesting experimental quality: the first and
second stories are essentially the same tale with the same dialogue,
but with contrasting orientations. Part 1 is set in New York in 1993,
with Bill (William Sage) standing in a phone booth, listening to a
lover, Emily (Parker Posey), trying to talk him into making a marriage
proposal before she accepts another. After they hang up, Bill is on
the line with Margaret (Hannah Sullivan), making the same sort of
entreaties Emily had made to him. Reality and fantasy start to merge as
three homeless men begin advising Bill in a restroom about his love
life, and Margaret's husband gets ready to shoot himself. Part 2 is
set in Berlin in 1944, where the preceding story is recycled among a
group of homosexual characters. Finally, the trilogy ends in 1995
Tokyo, where we watch a mime troupe distill Hartley's narrative
template to its dramatic essence. The overall effect of Hartley's
wandering eye for locale and placement is a compelling study of the
mysteries of "story" itself, a formalist issue the writer-director has
always dealt with in the most disarming, comic ways. There's less
laughter in Flirt than in Hartley's previous movies (though
that's not true of his subsequent work), but this is a more baldly
self-referential piece than he has made before. --Tom Keogh
