Trust

A film reminiscent of Hal Hartley’s earlier film The Unbelievable Truth in its mood and approach. It is a black comedy with grim and romantic elements. An inexpensively made film rich in emotions. Derek Malcolm wrote in The Guardian: `Hartley is the kind of film-maker you get in America only once or twice in a generation’. His personal style evolves from the fact that he is involved in all phases of the film process: he writes, directs, edits and composes (under a pseudonym). And the location for his film, Lindenhurst, Long Island, is his home.Protagonist in Trust is Maria Coughlin (a role for which actress Adrienne Shelly received universal praise), an headstrong girl of seventeen who is expecting a local football star’s baby. He leaves her in the lurch when he hears she is pregnant. When her father finds out, he has a heart attack and dies. Maria leaves home and after extensive wandering bumps into Matthew, a pleasant but crazy computer engineer who causes chaos at work and in the bar. He also always has a hand grenade in his pocket so he always has the permanent solution at hand. There are other more or less absurd characters on the scene: Rachel, a depressive housewife who kidnaps a baby, Peg, Maria’s divorced sister who is forced by her mother to go to bed with Matthew, and the mother Jean, who displays a sadistic attitude to her daughters. Trust excels in the laconic way in which Hartley visualises all this insanity.