Back in the mid-1980s, when I was in my mid-twenties, I made a short film. Made with a very small budget, I tried to make it bold and distinctive, treating the limitations as positives: I used bright primary colours, a static camera, each short scene was a single shot (that made editing simple), there were actors and a narrative but the actors had no dialogue, a voiceover carrying the narrative. It was deeply Godardian and was (or attempted to be) a witty and playful response to the conventions of the thriller and murder mystery. I wonder if I had the persistence and fortitude and talent to carry on and if I had finally ‘made it’, whether I would have ended up making films like Amateur. I mention this because if I now find Amateur distinctive and intriguing, but also immature and slightly irritating in its self-conscious playfulness, I wonder how much I am reacting to Hal Hartley’s film and how much to my youthful self and mid-twenties enthusiasms. For five years Hal Hartley was a very hip filmmaker: maybe he didn’t have Tarantino’s big commercial success, but that was partly because he was more Art House, more obvious in his debts to Godard. But then he disappeared: at least, I’ve only seen one film he has made in the last 25 years and if I wanted to see more I’m not sure how I would go about it. I saw Amateur back in the 1990s, around the time I was catching up with Hartley’s slightly older films, and I remember I liked it: I liked the cool stylisation, the playfulness, the ridiculous plotting, the deadpan dialogue, the homage to Godard (or is it just to Bande à part?) and, of course, Isabelle Huppert…I liked all the things we are supposed to like about Amateur. Returning to it almost 25 years later I’m no so sure…but this must partly because I am 25 years older: I’m not necessarily any wiser, but I have seen 25 years’ worth of cool, stylised films filled with generic playfulness – enough’s enough. I can’t help asking what’s it all for? I now want films to offer more than generic playfulness. Of course, some films do. The generic playfulness in Coen Brothers’ films builds a coherent Coen Brothers’ absurdist world, one that moves from the comic to the dangerous and lethal. But I’m not convinced Amateur does anything more than create a distinctive, stylised, off kilter world…and maybe that’s enough, most films don’t even manage to be distinctive. Yes, overall I still enjoyed Amateur, but I can’t help feeling its an immature form of filmmaking – and while I remember enjoying it when I first saw it in my thirties, I imagine I would have like it more when I was in my twenties. Maybe there are marvellous films hidden away in Hartley’s later filmography, but I suspect he did everything he had to do in three or so features and after that it was just a repetition of self-conscious stylistic tics.