"Flirt" takes place in New York, Berlin and Tokyo, with each segment using the same dialogue. The three-part film is about desire and commitment: a lover has to choose whether to commit to a partner who is returning home. In each case there are other people involved, an ex-partner and someone else in a permanent relationship.
Part 1 is set in New York in 1993. Bill (William Sage) is a handsome ladies' man whose girlfriend Emily (Parker Posey) is about to leave for a vacation in Paris. Once there, she warns, she might hook up with an old lover unless Bill commits to her within the next 90 minutes. Standing in a phone booth, he listens to Emily try to talk him into making a marriage proposal. After they hang up, Bill is on the line with Margaret (Hannah Sullivan), making the same sort of demands 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. Bill loves Emily and also Margaret, the wife of his close friend Walter (Martin Donovan). Running into him in a bar, Bill finds Walter carrying a gun and threatening suicide. His wife has left him and he accuses Bill of having designs on her. During a struggle for the gun, the weapon goes off, grazing Bill's face. As he is painfully stitched up in a hospital emergency room, he is encouraged to think of something pleasant and murmurs his sexual fantasies to the attendant nurses, who are clearly aroused. Then he dashes off for the airport.
Part 2 is set in Berlin in 1944, where the preceding story is recycled among a group of homosexual characters. The main character is Dwight (Dwight Ewell), who has a similar experience with his lover. Dwight is a saucy young black American who swivels around in black leather pants and a gold shirt while weighing his relationship with Johann (Dominik Bender), an older German art dealer. Dwight's latest crush is Werner (Jacob Klaffke), a middle-aged German painter who has just left his wife Greta (Geno Lechner) in a state of suicidal depression.
Finally, the trilogy ends in 1995 Tokyo, where we watch a mime troupe distill Hartley's narrative to its dramatic essence. The final flirt is Miho (Miho Nikaidoh), a Japanese dance student whose boyfriend, an American film maker, is about to go to Los Angeles. When rumors of Miho's flirtation with her dance teacher, Mr. Ozu (Toshizo Fujiwara), drive Ozu's wife (Chikako Hara) to threaten to shoot herself, Mr. Ozu asks Miho to dispose of his wife's gun, and Miho finds herself pursued by the police and arrested for possession of a deadly weapon.
The emergency room sequences are completely different from one another. Where Bill is fawned over with discreet lust, Dwight is treated with calm detachment, and Miho with frantic desperation. Although the sexual fantasies that the characters use to distract themselves from the pain of Novocaine injections are very different, they share the image of "spooning," which they explain is lying curled up side by side with their lovers
This is a very personal film that has something universal to say. It is stylistically bold without being gaudy, excessive, and makes the same plot interesting three times. The cute gimmick of repeating the same situations in three different locations with three different casts makes the film a three ring circus: NY, Berlin, and Tokyo. The setting may change, but the questions are the same. Acting performances are not the best, with the exception of Dwight Ewell, who plays Dwight in the Berlin portion of the film. There is some light comic realism and absurdity. In the funniest recurring set piece, each flirt impulsively blurts out his romantic confusion to a bunch of strangers and is given advice that is amusing and contradictory. Hal Hartley and Jeffrey Taylor composed the original music, and Hal Hartley wrote the script and directed. In English, German, and Japanese with English subtitles.
