It has been seven years since Fay Grim’s (Parker Posey) husband Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan) disappeared, and after being summoned to her 14-year-old son Ned’s (Liam Aiken) school to see him reprimanded for a gross indecency she can’t help but wonder if he’s going to turn out just like his dad. She’s a bit of a mess, the woman’s life spiraling in serpentine patterns forcing her to wonder what is going to become of the two of them.

Her brother, noted poet Simon (James Urbaniak) still in prison for helping Henry escape from the authorities, has his own suspicions. Once upon a time, he was positive his good friend was nothing more than a highly imaginative fruit cake, but after so much time behind bars he isn’t so sure anymore. These suspicions are only magnified when his publisher Angus (Chuck Montgomery) smuggles one of Henry’s long-lost manuscripts into the penitentiary, the one-time garbage man now more certain than ever nothing all those years ago was ever as it truly seemed.

Enter a CIA agent named Fulbright (Jeff Goldblum). He wants the rest of Henry’s manuscripts, but the only way he can get them is if Fay is willing to fly to Paris and bring them back to the United States for him. In order to save her brother and provide a better life for her son, this brazenly honest and not altogether confident woman is soon flying around the globe searching for a husband she’s not even certain she still loves. Battling rogue spies, murderous terrorists and one seriously freaked-out flight attendant, Fay realizes she’s not that over her head, a hoped-for reunion with Henry the one thing keeping her moving forward even as the whole of the free (and even the not-so-free) world becomes intent trying to stop her.

As sequels go, I’m trying to think of more illogical and random one then Fay Grim. Writer-director Hal Hartley’s 1998 sensation Henry Fool was nothing short of a bona fide masterpiece, many people (including me) feeling it was the Trust and No Such Thing creator’s absolute best. So why return to it now? Why risk marginalizing a work so dazzlingly brilliant by crafting a sequel which can’t help but pale in comparison?

Because he can, that’s why, and when you’ve got an actress as fearlessly talented and as devastatingly funny as Posey in the lead role you might as well give it the old college try. Fay Grim may certainly be no Henry Fool but that doesn’t mean it isn’t without merits, elements of this sequel so daring and bracingly offbeat I couldn’t have taken my eyes off of it had I even tried. Posey commands the screen, so heartbreakingly hysterical there should be an entirely new definition for what it is the actress is able to accomplish within this story’s modest (if constantly evolving) storyline.

Be all that as it may, it must be stated this Hartley banquet is still a mess. Sometimes it is an innately galvanizing, mind-bogglingly amazing, wretchedly comical and fitfully dazzling mess, but still a mess nonetheless. The whole story behind Fay’s journey makes little-to-no sense, all of it filmed and acted in such a stilted and a skewed fashion it’s actually a bit difficult to get in to for almost the entire first half hour. The movie is flat-out odd, and while fans of Hartley probably won’t consider that a surprise to say it is also aloof and emotionally constipated might be.

And yet, I couldn’t help but watch this one and smile. This is a spy-versus-spy thriller for those who think they are above such forms of genre entertainment, Hartley taking many of the conventions of the drama and spinning them so far onto their heads it’s almost a wonder they don’t pop off like daffodil tops. More, as things build to their concussive conclusions the filmmaker actually has something quite interesting to say, the state of the world and the discussions those within it refuse to conduct (let alone condone) dissected with all the verbose skill of a satirical linguist picking apart a political thriller which has been crossed with the maudlin giddiness of an unrequited romance novel.

I still of course wonder if Hartley really needed to return to these characters and to this story almost a decade later. I also find myself pondering if I’d be so willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and read so much into it if I didn’t think Henry Fool wasn’t a work of genius. No matter, I’m still willing to go along for the ride, and with Posey making for such an ethereal and enchanting conductor Fay Grim is easy to make friends with.

Film Rating:  êê1/2  (out of 4)