Flirt, Hartley's fifth full-length feature, adds a twist, however, by abandoning straight narrative and eventually abandoning an American setting all together. Seemingly taking a clue from Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth, Flirt is composed of three vignettes set in New York, Berlin, and Tokyo, respectively. Rather than using Jarmusch's device of different stories unfolding across the world at the same time, however, Hartley's vignettes show the same story being played out in three different settings -- dialogue and all.

The first vignette -- set in New York and featuring Hartley regulars, including the always perfect Martin Donovan as a jilted husband -- introduces the love-triangle-plus-gun plot in the director's typical dry, offbeat style. Through the course of the next two sequences -- shot not only in different locales, but at different times and with different crews -- the original is warped by the changes in character and setting. A man deciding between two women in New York becomes a man deciding between two men in Berlin and a woman deciding between two men (one of whom is Hartley as Hartley) in Tokyo.