Meanwhile (2011, Hal Hartley) (Patreon)

59/100

Catching up with the sole Hartley feature I'd never seen (unless you wanna count a filmed opera he directed 10 years ago), which never got a theatrical release. Like Surviving Desire and The Book of Life, it runs about an hour and feels comfortable at that length; like Flirt (which I rewatched the previous night), it incorporates some playful but inessential metafiction, setting scenes in Possible Films' office—though Hartley himself, repeatedly alluded to as "the boss", remains off-camera this time—and having the gossamer-thin plot involve lesser-known Hartley regular DJ Mendel traversing New York to reach Miho Nikaido's apartment (both within the narrative and in real life; btw I only discovered this week that Hartley and Nikaido married shortly after Flirt). Plays sort of like Full Time stripped of all urgency, a busy yet laid-back day in the life of someone who enjoys solving other people's problems while juggling many of his own. Mendel has a less mannered presence than Hartley generally favors, coming across as more of a regular Joe (here in fact named Joe), and navigates each of the film's barely connected anecdotes—pitching a business plan to import German windows, arranging to pay someone who'd gotten stiffed after performing in some video project he'd worked on, auditioning as a drummer for a alt-country band, getting his bank account unfrozen, fixing a famous author's typewriter, etc.—with smooth ease. Doesn't really add up to much, and I saw the ending coming [looks up distance from Brooklyn Bridge to Washington Heights] 10.2 miles away (by which I mean the jumper's identity—felt very confident not only that it wasn't the woman he met on the bridge but that she'd turn up alive and well in the final scene; did not anticipate the other thing that happens), but given how convoluted Hartley's Henry Fool sequels (one of which he hadn't yet made) were, this gentle sketch's simplicity comes across as downright refreshing.