Henry Fool

Looser, more expansive and certainly more scatological than Hartley's earlier work, this very funny, finally touching fable focuses on the way Henry Fool (Ryan) - a bawdy, rebellious, intellectually gifted drifter, and quite possibly a charlatan - transforms the lives of the inhabitants of a small town: notably, shy, put-upon Simon Grim (Urbaniak), who under Fool's auspices becomes both celebrated as a writer and demonised as a pornographer; his promiscuous sister (Posey) and depressive mother (Porter). For all its outrageous black humour, however, it remains a Hartley movie, with its wittily stylised dialogue, droll performances, crisp camerawork and its profoundly ironic musings on the nature of art and its status in society - musings which surely reflect on Hartley's own status as an ambitious but marginalised film-maker.