On demand: "Where to Land"

It's been over a decade since the last Hal Hartley feature, and three decades since the heyday of the New Independent Cinema in which Hartley first came to prominence, so perhaps we should recontextualise his work for the benefit of those generations who haven't yet stumbled across The Unbelievable Truth, Amateur or Flirt at their nearest rep cinema or videostore. (Those films are rarely revived, and everything's gone online: Hartley presently rents out his back catalogue via his own website, the digital equivalent of a director selling DVDs out of a van.) New Yorker Hartley was among that wave of hip young indie kids who insisted it's good to talk, although unlike Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino, Hartley was trading in crisp, clean, quality talk. It was the kind of talk a certain bookish strain of cinemagoer might have aspired to have, filled with casual, throwaway references to French philosophers; Hartley's accomplishment was to get late 20th century film characters conversing like folks in the pages of a late 19th century novel. His closest contemporary was Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco) - himself now somewhat off-radar and rarely revived - but Hartley surely owed more to a strain of European arthouse that began with Rohmer and found its way into the films of Eugène Green and Matías Piñeiro. His latest Where to Land, a characteristically droll self-portrait about a middle-aged director's sputtering attempts to write his last will and testament, addresses the unbelievable passage of time from the off: its opening scene, a reunion for the leads of Hartley's Simple Men with echoes of Hamlet, finds besuited protagonist Joe (Bill Sage) informing sceptical church groundskeeper Leonard (Robert John Burke) that he's ready to trade in his camera for a shovel and spade. He'll eventually get digging in other ways, but for the time being this prospective career change triggers panic in his loved ones, who witness Joe's sudden interest in legacy and assume something must be morbidly wrong. As his wide-eyed niece Veronica (Katelyn Sparks), struck by sudden revelation, observes: "He does talk a lot more about the terrible beauty of nature's disregard for the human." Sometimes, the talk is about talk itself.

Certain things have changed in Hartleyland. Diminishing budgets have only accentuated this director's habitually sparse (some have said minimalist) visual style, although Hartley has retained a supremely elegant eye for framing. In 2026, it's actually a rare pleasure to encounter frames that are this tidy and devoid of undue visual clutter; Hartley's blocking, fashioning a limber dance out of two people turning to talk to one another on the street, remains a joy, forever returning our focus to bodies, faces and voices, typically those of actors some of us grew up watching. And once again, those actors have been coached towards an utterly undemonstrative performance style that, among other benefits, represents the antithesis of whatever Jessie Buckley was doing to win her Oscar. The funniest (and most Godardian) gag here may be conceptual: Hartley has staged a farce populated by characters refusing to play ball, their minds being perpetually on far horizons and higher things. Where to Land is still a series of conversations Joe has: with the super in his apartment (Joe Perrino), who mostly enters our guy's flat just to drink his extra light beer; with the academic writing a book on him (Aida Johannes), who stands for all those academics (and journalists) who've developed mad ideas about Hartley over the years; with a historian (Kathleen Chalfant) who insists "bad times are coming, but good things do get done"; with his ex-wife (Edie Falco), who has only finite patience for Joe's hemming and hawing. What's crucial is that it's engaging conversation: ruminative, wide-ranging, sometimes serious, sometimes not, with much to say on how best to be helpful in a moment when the world is on fire. (In short: no need to dig graves just yet, but this might not be the worst time to cultivate your garden, to paraphrase Candide.) It's a project that has assumed extra value as a vision of a civilised, more orderly America: books on shelves, thoughts in heads, hope clung to in weary, battle-hardened hearts. In and of itself, though, it's also a teachable example of late style. The essence of a singular filmmaker boiled down to its 74-minute basics, Where to Land winds down with a readthrough - a fresh start - in what appears to be Hartley's own living quarters. Good things do still get done, but nowadays they're often off-radar, behind closed doors and among close friends: Where to Land is unmistakably one of them.

Where to Land is now available to rent via halhartley.com.