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Henry Fool isn’t the sort of film that normally warrants a sequel. And Fay Grim isn’t the sort of sequel one would expect as a continuation of the events in its predecessor. Whatever writer/director Hal Hartley’s motives in continuing the stories of these characters, waves at the box office caused by nostalgic affection for a film from ten years prior certainly weren’t among them. The original made $1.3 million during the summer and early fall of 1998, playing in no more than 50 theaters at once.

The feature concerning the further exploits of Mr. Fool’s wife and brother-in-law made about $126,000 playing for about a month in a handful of locations in the late spring of 2007 (it was one of the early films to be released in the theaters and on DVD within the same week.) Until I made the decision to review Fay Grim for this week’s column, it’s safe to say that my first answer to the question “Is there a sequel to Henry Fool?” would be a too-quick “No” — and I had seen Fay Grim on the big screen!

Henry Fool isn’t the sort of film that it does any good to label a masterpiece, for as accomplished as it is, it’s far from the easiest film to love. It’s a sprawling, messy, vulgar, violent, deadpan scattershot satire that seemed to be completely out of step with its time back then. Now, with 13 years hindsight, it proves to be a remarkable time capsule of the late '90s in terms of attitudes, politics, and social change in a tight-knit community, and to have been remarkably prescient about what lay ahead in the decade to come.

Fay Grim is a reaction to the 2000s and casts off the bonds of love/hate that tie us together at a local level for a more sullen, less quirky globetrotting look at the complete lack of ties among the international community, via a small cadre of undercover agents from various countries eagerly willing to bump one another off to get their hands on a set of coded notebooks that seem to spill the beans on any number of state secrets concerning any number of the world’s countries.

Henry Fool, like many of Hartley’s films from the '90s (The Unbelievable Truth, Trust, Amateur) alternates between moments of cockeyed realism and quietness and brutal — though usually bloodless — moments of unexpected violence and out-of-left-field plot twists. In its most disgusting and romantic moment, the intestinal distress caused by seven espressos (with sound effects that far surpass Jeff Daniels’ similar moment in Dumb & Dumber), and a metal fitting from a drainpipe mistaken for a wedding ring, result in an offhand gesture construed as a wedding proposal.

At the core is a trio of oddball characters - a Mephistophelean stranger with a criminal record (who I now realize is a visual ringer for David Foster Wallace) forever working on his multi-volume “Confessions”; the put-upon garbage man he inspires to also become a writer; and the garbage man’s sister, she of low self-esteem and a forever revolving bedroom door—followed over about seven years. The significant changes in their lives are accentuated by the visible, but never overtly framed, life movements in their milieu.

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