FILMS/
FAY GRIM
World Cinema
USA/Germany, 2006, 118 minutes
SHOWTIMES
Mon, Apr 30 / 09:15 / Kabuki / FAY30K
Thu, May 3 / 09:10 / PFA / FAY03P
CREDITS
- dir
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Hal Hartley
- prod
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Michael S. Ryan, Martin Hagemann, Jason Kliot
- scr
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Hal Hartley
- cam
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Sarah Cawley Cabiya
- editor
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Hal Hartley
- mus
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Hal Hartley
- cast
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Parker Posey, Jeff Goldblum, James Urbaniak, Saffron Burrows, Liam Aiken
- source
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Magnolia Pictures, 49 West 27th Street, 7th Floor, New York , NY 10001 FAX: 212-924-6742 EMAIL: mwendel@magpictures.com
Remember Henry Fool? In Hal Hartley’s sequel of sorts to his 1997 opus, titular heroine Fay Grim embarks on a quest to discover the "unbelievable truth" about that fool Fool, with whom she had a son years ago. As an implacably devoted wife and mother, the unsinkable Grim (delightfully played by Parker Posey, channeling Louise Lasser in the venerable ’70s faux-soap Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman), with an overflowing bag of groceries clutched to her chest, finds herself enmeshed in an ever-tightening web of clues, crimes and international espionage that take her from the kitchen table to the Bosporus Straits via the top hotels and boudoirs of Paris. Applying his inimitable mix of tragicomic melodrama and machine-gun dialogue exchange, Hartley pays homage to Fassbinder’s brave heroines, Godard’s cinematic wit and the screwball universe of Howard Hawks in this epic for our twisted times. Employing the talents of several members of Hartley’s prodigiously gifted thespian corps, Fay Grim features the stone-faced James Urbaniak (as Simon Grim, the "garbageman/poet of Woodside, Queens"), Elina Löwensohn (as the mysterious Bebe Konchalovsky), Thomas Jay Ryan (reprising his role as pompous prose peddler Henry) and Jeff Goldblum (as CIA lead operative and arch-villain Agent Fulbright). Filmed in stunningly saturated high-definition color, the angular, oblique optics of Fay Grim cast a bright beam of light upon the darkness of our days.
—Karen Davis
Sponsored by Clift Hotel.