The Jean-Luc Godard of Long Island

ELBOWS AT HIS SIDES AND PALE FINGERS CROSSED IN FRONT OF HIS chin, Hal Hartley slumps in a chair and stares miserably out his 33d-floor hotel window at a mute Tokyo sprawl, which seems like nothing if not the grim future. The son and brother of ironworkers, and himself a former punk apprentice on his father’s seven-man skyscraper-raising crew, Hartley wears big, tawny work boots, blue janitorial pants and a faded work shirt, but the 6-foot-3 director has none of the physical self-possession of a hard hat. Hartley has lank, light brown hair and an upper lip permanently pursed by an attack by a Doberman a decade ago – “One of those screwed-up dogs that people tell you are harmless,” he says.

Hartley, who is in Japan to shoot the final installment of “Flirt,” his elegant proof of the cruelty of love opening in New York this week, is so resolutely unhip and uncharismatic that you resent him for it. Straightforward and subdued, if not depressed, Hartley walks with a plodding gait, talks with a slight lisp and jots notes to himself with a yellow plastic mechanical pencil he holds with three fingertips on the barrel. Although the sincerity of his smile and his brilliant, pale blue eyes make him attractive, it’s not surprising that his most persistent theme is the fear of getting one’s heart stomped.

Hartley hates being interviewed, hates being the object of dim scrutiny and obtuse analysis and most of all hates his own droning responses. The days before, he had such a violent reaction to his unflattering remarks about “Clerks,” the low-budget independent hit of two years ago, in which the director credited his as a source of inspiration, that he had to go back to his room and lie down. Nevertheless, he had spent almost every waking moment with me for four days, graciously inviting me to join him for breakfast, lunch and dinner and numerous Sapporos in between.

With their glacial pacing, burnished images and preoccupation with the same narrow band of concerns, Hartley’s films bear and indelible aspect is a low-level, festering rage utterly immune to catharsis. The male characters, particularly those played by Martin Donovan, his close friend and cinematic alter ego, spend an entire film doing a slow burn, but never go off with anywhere near enough vehemence to do themselves or us any good.

In Japan, Hartley exudes the same stymied combination of deference and anger, behaving like a seething saint. One afternoon, Hartley visits Yoshito Ohno, a Butoh choreographer who help he has enlisted for a tiny dance sequence. He spends an hour and a half watching a tape of Ohno’s work, before finally asking if they could talk about the project at hand. Later that day, he interviews a wardrobe person even after he has just hired someone else. And this afternoon, as he squints into the haze, his first live-in girlfriend and soon-to-be wife, the stunning Japanese actress Miho Nikaido (whom he cast in “Flirt” after seeing her demure portrayal of an S-and-M call girl in the scandalous “Tokyo Decadence”), impatiently sashays back and forth from the bathroom in skin-tight bell-bottoms. It’s obvious that Hartley want to ask me to leave, but just can’t do it.

HAL HARTLEY, LIKE HIS MOVIES, IS EASY TO underestimate. The evidence suggests that Hartley, 36, is one of the most industrious and least compromising young artists in America. In seven years since his first film, “The Unbelievable Truth,” opened to raves at the Toronto Film Festival in 1989, he has written and directed five features and twice as many significant shorts, all of which have remained absolutely faithful to his droll hair-shirt esthetic. And despite international critical acclaim and a growing cult that includes Francis Ford Coppola, Brian DePalma and Jane Campion, Hartley has not only resisted the lure of Hollywood, but hasn’t even taken an agent. “There were a couple of months early on, where I thought maybe I should,” Hartley says, “but I just waited for the feeling to go away.”

Then again, Hartley has particular talent for saying, “No,” taking an almost priestly satisfaction in withholding all the dependable tawdry little pleasures of the cinema. If you want sex, violence, breathtaking panoramas, guffaws or just a good cry, you’ve stumbled into the wrong dark room. In his last film, “Amateur,” Hartley told the story of an amnesiac pornographer, his former, under-age leading lady and a nymphomaniac nun without shooting a single licentious frame. Even off-screen sex is kept to a minimum. “I just took it for granted,” says Hartley, “that an unconsummated love affair is more interesting in the movies. People are compromised once they reach a certain level of intimacy.”

They don’t even get to smile at each other. “Smiles are too easy,” he says. “Love stories aren’t about boys and girls, they are about pain and struggle and fear.” Asked if he wants his audience to enjoy his movies, he says: “Enjoy? No, they have to work. Anything worthwhile necessitates work.”

Yet despite their papal prohibitions, Hartley’s films grow on you. It’s like getting on an elevator and discovering that what you thought was Muzak was really Duke Ellington. At their best, the films are elegant, understated, and hilarious; they make even the freshest Hollywood products seem like hysterical braying.

In “Flirt,” Hartley pushes his autistic fascination with repetition and rules to the wall, telling three love stories, two straight and one gay, using the identical dialogue. As we move from New York to Berlin to Tokyo, we see with a kind of scientific clarity that in all love stories the words never change. In every pairing, one person feels smothered, the other taken for granted. One fears he is in over his head. One suspects he can do a little better. The only variable is whose heart is being broken.

That Hartley applies the same kinds of restraints to himself that he does to his work, makes him an anomaly in his profession. The urge to direct has always been at least as about the need to reign and run amok as about making movies. Hartley, who in 12 meals never monopolizes a conversation or sits portentously silent, is so ferociously confident of the value of his work that he shows no need to transform it or himself into something bigger. “There were so many voices after ‘The Unbelievable Truth,’” he says. “ ‘You got a real buzz happening. You got to cash in. You got to turn it into something real.’ Well I thought my film was real.”

IF HARTLEY HAD FOLLOWED THE PATTERN OF many young auteurs, his first feature might have celebrated the colorful otherness of his clannish Irish-Catholic Lindenhurst enclave, settled in the 1950’s by Newfoundlanders. Hartley’s cousin, former producer and neighbor Bob Gosse describes the three-block area as a “Newfy stew, where everyone was related in some indecipherable way, and people sang and fought and drank like fish.” To Hartley, however, there is something unseemly about redeeming family history like Green Stamps.

One evening in the hotel bar, Hartley described how he and his three siblings were farmed out to relatives for several years after the death of his mother when he was 12. The next evening, Hartley insists I can’t use any of it. “It’s nothing unusual,” he says. “Besides, your childhood doesn’t really belong to you. It belongs to your parents.” When I was slow to reassure him, Hartley said, with utter seriousness, “If it is in there, I will do everything in my power to kill you.” Then we went out to dinner as if nothing had happened.

Although it’s a rare artist who doesn’t feel he has first dibs on his own childhood, there are powerful autobiographical currents in Hartley’s movies, particularly in his depiction of fathers, which has evolved over the years from bitter rage to a bending-over-backward tone of conciliation.

Hartley’s real-life father, Hal Sr., is a semi-legendary ironworker who, as a crane operator and foreman in Manhattan, put up dozens of city skyscrapers and was widely known for both his skill and intolerance for ineptitude. “There were people who came from all over the East Coast to work for Hal Hartley,” says his son, “and other who quit after a day.”

Asked what the old man was like, Hartley proceeds with extreme diffidence. It’s as if the two have barely met, and he has had to use his imagination to flesh out what he has culled from others. “Here was this guy,” he says, “who had no idea how to deal with children, suddenly stuck with four of them.” When I ask him how his father reacted to his first attempts at film making, he says: “He had no idea what to make of me. He thought I was useless.” Yet when I ask if a desire to escape Lindenhurst and his father fueled his remarkable output, he says, “Actually, I have been moving toward my father my whole life.”

After high school, Hartley spent a year studying art and then withdrew for financial reasons, but not before shooting a very simple short about light passing through beer. Hartley was then accepted into the film program at State University of New York at Purchase and, for most of the next few summers, found himself cooking and cleaning the house or working as the low man on his father’s crew.

If the fictional events in “Trust” – in which the son is beaten up by the father for doing a bad job cleaning the bathroom – are any indication, this was not a happy time. But in Tokyo, Hartley takes pains to point out its value: watching his father run his crew, he says, taught him a great deal about “bosshood” and “the ruthlessness that is required to get things done.”

The same kind of planning that made his father’s buildings go up so quickly and quietly allowed Hartley to shoot “The Unbelievable Truth” in 11 days and to bring in all his films on schedule and under budget. Hartley, in returning to the same cinematographer (Michael Spiller), co-producer (Ted Hope) and small ensemble of actors, has even created his own version of a seven-man raising crew.

Hartley’s movies have none of the rough edges – hand-held camera, grainy film – so often affected by independents. “There’s a right way and a wrong way to do things,” he says one evening in a Tokyo bar. “If you make a chair, you want to make a nice chair. You want people to admire it. I think doing something well is a form of respect for humanity in general.”

As Hartley talks, there is a palpable edge to his voice. “I have found that all incompetence,” he says, “comes from not paying attention, which comes from people doing something that they don’t want to do. And doing what you don’t want to do means you either have no choice, or you don’t think that the moments of your life are worth fighting for.”

Nevertheless, when “Trust” was released, Hartley was understandably worried about his father’s reaction, and recalls taking him to the Angelika theater on West Houston Street in Manhattan and then waiting for him in a nearby coffee shop. “When my father walked in, the only thing he said about the movie was, ‘Very interesting.’”

A couple of months later, I call Hartley’s father, who is recovering well from a quadruple bypass and is still living in the same house in Lindenhurst. It turns out, of course, that Hartley’s father never thought that his son was useless. “Although I knew he didn’t want to go into my kind of work, it was clear he could be good at whatever he wanted to do,” he says in a clipped but still strong Newfoundland accent.

Asked about “Trust,” he pleads a lack of education - “I think his movies are a little over my head” – but when I pass on how much his son feels he picked up from working on his crew, he’s so stunned that there’s a long pause at the other end of the line.

HARTLEY’S FILMS ARE THICK WITH NUNS AND divinity students, Catholic-school girls in short plaid skirts and references to the Virgin Mary, about whom a character in “Simple Men” gushes, “Not only is she good-looking, but she has a great personality and is the mother of God.” He is the kind of guy who enjoys reading about the phenomenon of Marian apparitions and the lives of saints. “St. Francis was this young buck, who one day took off all his clothes and went to live in the woods,” says Hartley. “I love the economy and audacity of that.”

Hartley got his chance to make his first feature at the end of 1987, when Jerome Brownstein, the owner of a production company that made industrial films and commercials, where Hartley worked as an assistant, agreed to help finance it. Ted Hope says that although after Toronto Hartley could easily have taken the film, shot for $60,000, to Sundance and parlayed the reaction into a Hollywood production deal, he instead went immediately to work on his second low budget feature, “Trust.” That disinclination to cash in on his first success was probably the turning point of his career.

Hartley treats all of his characters with respect, but pours it on extra thick for the ladies, depicting them with a reverence somewhere between longing and adoration. He calls “Trust” an attempt to create a modern version of a saint’s legend. “‘Trust’ took as its starting point,” he says, “the question, ‘What would happen if a movie took the character of a teen-age girl seriously?’”
“He just digs girls,” says Hartley’s brother Pat, by way of explanation, but his oldest friend, Ricky Ludwig, suggests it may have to do with the series of benevolent aunts who looked out for him after the death of his mother, or the fact that Hartley as a young man was notably unsuccessful with women. “He was kind of like this lonely wandering troubadour,” says Ludwig. And David Schwartz, a classmate at Purchase who is now the director of the Museum of Moving Image in Queens, recalls, “He was the kind of guy who you knew was never going to be in a relationship.”

Professionally and socially, Hartley’s approach has worked like a charm. A large segment of the Hartley cult is female, and the director says he is often approached by members of this sub-group who tell him about the beloved copies of “Trust” in their closets. When asked how success has changed his life, his stock answer is, “It’s made it a lot easier to meet girls.” One wonders what these loyalists would think if they saw Hartley in Tokyo with the wispy Miho Nikaido, who flirtatiously refers to him as “Mr. Hartley” and takes him by the elbow as they stroll the streets.

When I ask Hartley about all his noble female characters, he doesn’t dissemble. “Yeah, I pander to women, but don’t we all? We want to be nice guys, and we want our dirty kicks too.” When I press him further, it becomes clear that he has been mulling over the issue for some time. He says that while researching “Amateur,” he went to topless bars and interviewed some of the dancers, one of whom had seen all his movies. “I see your respect for women,” she told him, “but I don’t see your lust.” “I said, ‘That’s probably because I’m embarrassed by my lust,’” Hartley recalls, adding that his response was one of the least-guarded statements he’d ever made.

A happy result of this soul searching is Hartley’s first genuinely lascivious scene, based in part on his own unfortunate experience with the Doberman. In a New York city emergency room, the male flirt is getting his lip stitched up, and because the wound can’t hold the anesthetic, he is instructed by the nurse to think of something very specific to occupy his mind. When she asks what he has come up with, his trancelike description of himself and his girlfriend in bed is as distracting to the nurse and female doctor as the patient. “It’s titillating,” concedes Hartley, “but it’s good high-quality titillation.”