Amazon.com reviews for
Flirt (1995) More at IMDbPro »

Flirt (vhs):

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