FILM : A Director Who Likes to Play the Angles

Introducing Hal Hartley, filmmaker from New York. Even though his fourth feature film, “Amateur” with French actress Isabelle Huppert, opens tomorrow in Los Angeles, chances are that you’ve never heard of him.

“In L.A. I’m very obscure, even in the business,” said Hartley by phone from New York. “I have a lot of actor friends here who go out to L.A. all the time. On their resume, the big thing that’s highlighted is “Amateur” or “Trust” or “Simple Men,” a film they did with Hal Hartley. And unanimously, the people, whether they be producers, casting directors or whatever, look at this and say, ‘What is this?’ They never know. It’s all right. This is a big country. It’s really many territories.”

Obscure in L.A., Hartley, 35, is well-known in Europe. In 1992, the Rotterdam Film Festival presented a retrospective of his work. After Huppert (“Madame Bovary,” “Story of Women”) saw “Trust,” she wrote Hartley a letter expressing interest in working with him. He met with her in Paris, and told her about a story he had in mind.

“She liked it a lot,” said Hartley. “She seemed to think it was something she wouldn’t get offered in France. I think she’s feeling the weight of her history in France. She represents a certain kind of style, a certain representation of women.”

In “Amateur,” Huppert plays an ex-nun in New York who writes pornographic stories and thinks she’s a nymphomaniac even though she has never had sex. When she heeds a calling to help a man suffering from amnesia recover his past, she becomes involved in his world, which includes his porn-actress wife and gun-toting accountants.

“Amateur” is at once a serious look at the impact of American mores and popular culture on our lives, and a very funny caper movie. Movie icons--cops, hit men, a shootout--present themselves, but here they’ve materialized from an unusual, sardonic perspective.

“It starts from a sad premise and it ends with the inevitable sadness that it talks about, [but] I can’t seem to write anything without having something in it tickle me,” Hartley said. “I like to ponder serious things. I think there’s also a built-in mechanism to not get too lugubrious.”

All of his films are peppered with people who fall down, pass out, even drop dead because “films are a great medium to just watch somebody fall down,” he said. “There’s a real fun in that. I love watching the Little Rascals, Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton doing all sorts of funny stuff.”

As in earlier Hartley films, the actors in “Amateur” often assume deadpan expressions and communicate in rat-a-tat exchanges. The camera beholds its subjects from atypical angles.

“I want to look at things with a fresh angle so that the angle speaks, as [do] the words the people are saying in that angle,” Hartley said.

The characters within his camera frame are not standard either. Contrary to today’s more commercial films, women are complex and central to the story.

“It’s hard to deny that I’ve written some female characters that women like a lot--like or respond to,” Hartley said. “It comes primarily from just a love of women and an interest in them. When you love something, you want to make sure that you are loving correctly. Conscience is involved in that too.

“I can be as sexist as any man if I’m not careful. People get lazy. Most of the work of treating people with respect comes down to vigilance, understanding certainly, but like most of our days we don’t understand much of anything. We forget things, we’re tired, we get cranky. Some people make a lifestyle out of that. I try to be vigilant.

“I’m interested in taking the normal shells of things--the shell of an accountant, the shell of a pornographic actress--and shoving them into other kinds of circumstances that will make them reveal the kind of humanity that we can all recognize. For me in movies and in books, that generally seems to be the point of excitement: the surprise of recognizing humanity again where you least expect it.”

But this graduate of the film program at the State University of New York believes that movies are “essentially photography and not drama,” he said. That point of view comes out of this Long Island native’s early enthusiasm for art. When he was 12, he discovered perspective.

“It was like a spell that I had to learn, and then I did it,” he said. “It was no longer the mystery it was, but it was still magic.”

Years later, at art school in Boston, he took a film course. “It was not a dramatic film course; it was visual art and it was done with the camera,” he said. “Something really clicked. I was making pictures, but the pictures moved. It just seemed magic for me, the same way as when . . . I learned to draw perspective.”

“Amateur” opens Friday at Laemmle’s Monica in Santa Monica and Laemmle’s Sunset 5 in West Hollywood.