Curtas started at the beginning of the 90s and this film by the New-Yorker Hal Hartley (born in 1959) is a great example of the spirit of the time. Today, the film has aged but some aspects still retain a certain freshness. The plot is simple: Jude (Martin Donovan), a literature teacher, is seduced by and falls head over heels in love with Sophie (Mary Ward) although all she wants is to use the affair as inspiration for a book she is writing. After the seminal "The Unbelievable Truth" (1989) and "Trust" (1990), Hartley reinforces here some of the essential characteristics of his work (and of a lot of the Sundance-like indie cinema much influenced by him), with a kind of unusual storytelling for the American cinema tradition up to that time: nonsense humor, philosophical-literary dialogue, masculine/feminine, winner/looser confrontations, (late) new wave aesthetics influence by the 50s – music band performance included – together with a lot of close-ups. Then there are cheeky film references: Godard (the leading female character’s hair cut is the same as that of Jean Seberg in "À Bout de Souffle"), Rohmer (obviously) or the American musicals (a choreography that reminds us of "West Side Story" but also of Jacques Demy). It was nouvelle vague casting its influence over the new wave. (Rodrigo Affeixo)