Fay Grim: A

Imagine for a moment that someone took the twisty devilry of the "Bourne" franchise and crossed it with the psuedo-pscychological satire of "American Beauty" and you'd have something close to what Hal Hartley has created in "Fay Grim". Once you consider the many great elements thrown into this production, though the idea may seem far-fetched, the result couldn't have been any less than great. Start with Parker Posey as Fay, toss in Jeff Goldblum as FBI Agent Fullbright, stir in a pench of romanticism, and set the whole thing to "sizzling originality" and out comes a straight-faced comedic espionage masterpiece.

Starting off 10 years after the end of "Henry Fool" (this is the sequel), writer-director Hartley starts off slow and builds on his plot like one would a building, adding extra floors of deception and fast-flying elevators of clever wordplay as the movie develops. Fay Grim (Parker Posey, nailing laughs even as she brushes her teeth) has a son (Liam Aiken) who has been kicked out of school for distributing a pornographic toy. She is afraid this is the first sign that he is becoming like his father, Henry, who dissapeared some years earlier and is now considered a fugitive from United States justice. With nowhere to turn she decides to get her brother, Simon (James Urbaniak), out of jail. Incidentally, the feds also need her to go to Europe and track down some of her husband's confessions, volumes filled with rubish that now presumably holds the key to many different countries' security. She agrees to the task in order to set Simon free and off she goes to France, almost immediately imbroiled in a globe-spanning conspiracy that looks silly only if we didn't see it every summer for $9 a piece.

Hartley, his camera almost always located at off-kilter angles, is a playful filmmaker though and isn't content to watch his project fall apart to the standard cliches. Yet he isn't willing to abandon them either. Working with a particular brand of alchemist magic, he instead mashes-up two unlikely genres - those of ridiculouso parody and noir-ish thriller - and pulled off a divine trick: a movie that is brazenly idiosyncratic, fresh, sublimely tart and suprisingly compelling. By the time Henry (Thomas Jay Ryan) himself shows up as a fiery egotist in the posession of his best friend, the terrorist (Anatole Taubman), you're either in on the joke or confounded by it. For those that get it, they're in for at treat; they have hooked onto the wavelength of a mad-cap storyteller and a dead-pan comedian and are witness to the work of a cult director reaching his artistic high.

Hartley pulls apart conventions like taffy and probes global issues with profundity and razor wit. Of course, he's also working with a supremely game cast, which makes the package all the sweeter. For those that aren't willing to go along with this brilliant cinematic creation, I'd call a doctor: something is seriously wrong with you.