Flirt (1995)

"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.

The Delta (1996)

Lincoln Bloom (Shayne Gray), an upper middle-class Jewish kid almost 18 years old, leads a straight life most of the time in Memphis, TN. He has a girl friend Monica (Rachel Zan Huss), goes to dances, and jokes with the guys. But he also has a secret life, in which he's drawn to dark places where he has sex with men he doesn't know. One night, while visiting a gay video arcade, he connects with Ming Nguyen (Thang Chan), aka John, a Vietnamese-born gay man, in his 20s probably, whose father was an African-American US soldier. John invites Lincoln to spend some carefree time with him, and Lincoln takes him to his father's boat. Along the way, John shares his life story and sense of frustration at not belonging in either his homeland or America.

John then convinces Lincoln to take the boat into the Mississippi delta, where setting off some fireworks out of season precipitates betrayal and revenge. After an entire day of hanging out together at various port towns along the river, the pair get in trouble with the police, resulting in a violent falling out. Lincoln returns to Memphis in his boat, looks up Monica, and faces his father's wrath. Meanwhile, John makes his way home as best he can, settles back into his routine as a layabout, and finally seeks out another sexual encounter, with an unexpected conclusion--a murder. We are left with his act of murder without ever understanding what drove him to it, or what really makes him tick. After 95 minutes the film simply ends without a proper resolution.

In this dreamy gay-themed quasi-documentary, the dialogue seems largely improvised, lending the story a certain authenticity. But the movie is muddled and doesn't know what to do with the central relationship, wasting too much time on other subjects. It should have made the storyline with the couple a lot more intense and interesting. When the story lurches into violent melodrama, the sudden change feels like an attempt to yank together its dramatic strands to make a coherent statement. But the change is too abrupt. The end result is a film that's intriguing but frustrating, and leaves too many loose ends dangling. It's a piece of entertainment, which show gays as purely dysfunctional human beings. Directed by Memphis native Ira Sachs, who cast the semi-autobiographical "The Delta" with non-actors after searching the pool halls and watering holes of his hometown for several months. Sachs wrote the screenplay, and Michael Rohatyn composed the music.