Fay Grim

After a couple of excursions into less familiar territory, Hal Hartley returns to his indie roots to pick up where 1998's Henry Fool left off - or almost.

To recap: eight years have passed since Henry Fool vanished after having accidentally killed someone. His wife Fay Grim was left to raise their young son Ned alone, and her Nobel Prize winning poet brother Simon was jailed for his complicity in the crime. Now Fay is falling apart, Ned is being expelled from school, and Simon has a chance at parole if Fay agrees to help out sinister CIA Agent Fulbright. He's on the trail of Henry's eight volume opus, Confessions, believed to have turned up in France. But why the sudden interest in what everyone has hitherto dismissed as Henry's pretentious literary drivel?

Familiarity with the earlier film isn't essential, as Fay's resulting odyssey through Paris and Istanbul has more than enough intrigue and mayhem to entertain. The off-kilter narrative is matched by a distinctly Hartleyesque shooting style, and the dialogue is similarly skewed. Best of all though is the force of nature that is Parker Posey, her performance as the neurotic but determined Fay simply carrying the film.

Sandra Hebron