Ambition (1991/II)

Director:

Hal Hartley

Writer:

Hal Hartley (writer)

Genre:

Comedy | Drama | Short

Plot:

This short film was packaged on video with Hartley's featurette "Surviving Desire." It follows a day...

Plot Keywords:

Nihilism | Work | Surrealism | Existentialism | Independent Film

Cast

George Feaster
Hannah Sullivan		(as Patricia Sullivan)
Rick Groel
James Michael McCauley
David Troup
Chris Buck
Margaret Mendelson
Julie Kessler		(as Julie Sukman)
Lasker
Bill Sage
Larry Meistrich
Michael McGarry
Casey Finch
Adam Bresnick
Elizabeth Feaster

Runtime:

UK:9 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Certification:

UK:PG

Company:

Alive from Off Center

Quotes:

Voice-over: Dwell on uncomplicated beauty: The landscape, the sun on your face. Nothing touches you. Keep the image of your death cheerfully before you at all times. Gain perspective. Seek to clarify and comfort, not to obscure or mystify. Your aspirations are pointless; your ambitions come to nothing.

Evocative sketch from Hartley. A little undergraduate.

After this, my second Hal Hartley venture, i'm quite impressed at how Hartley has crafted a unique style for himself, but start to think that that style is perhaps too eccentric and therefore gimmicky, and could begin to wear thin very quickly.

Hartley's style combines larger than life dialogue and performances, philosophising for comical purposes, a postmodern feeling of meaninglessness and random scenes of violence/disgust for shock purposes. All set to a synthesised piano score, which creates the same "can this be serious?" feeling in the viewer as the dialogue and performances.

Ambition is a succession of incredible scenes with a set of rules for reality all its own, as in many postmodern works like Lynch's Mulholland Dr.

In the end, though, its really just a sketch, a short story - but a fairly evocative one. Worth catching, if you can catch it for free, but i certainly wouldn't pay money to see it.