Amateur

Amateur

1994. USA/Great Britain/France. Written and directed by Hal Hartley. With Isabelle Huppert, Martin Donovan, Elina Löwensohn. Hal Hartley’s fourth feature, Amateur, found one bona fide European star—Isabelle Huppert—joining the director's semi-regular performers Martin Donovan, Elina Lowensohn, and Damien Young in a crazy-quilt thriller dealing with amnesia and international crime syndicates. Highly stylized and rigorously controlled, Amateur is nonetheless a film dealing with the randomness of city life, and it articulates Hartley’s mission to remain an “amateur” —a lover of cinema who is always learning through his pictures. (Hartley once described the film as “a TV cop show by someone who doesn’t know how to make TV cop shows.”) Hartley’s previous film, Simple Men, graced Filmmaker’s first cover, and this picture was profiled in our Spring 1995 issue. And, further, the subject of cinematic amateurism was discussed by Hartley and Jean-Luc Godard in the cover story of the magazine’s Fall 1994 issue. 105 min.