Revisit: Trust
A Fine Line Features release 1990
Written & Directed by Hal Hartley
A pregnant teen (Adrienne Shelly) meets a moody genius (Martin Donovan) with a hand grenade.
Hal Hartley's satirical view of suburban drama is arbitrary, but interesting none-the-less; a soap-opera world of absurdisms stuck in a Long Island vacuum, where things just happen. Roger Ebert once wrote "when a Hartley film plays on TV, you won't be tempted to go channel-surfing because the movie will seem to be switching programming for you", and it's true, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Trust has just enough American-indie, dysfunctional family quirk to keep it from feeling manufactured; considering the time of its release, it's probably more responsible for influencing the modern commodified indie backlash. The film is a ball of ideas, some work and some don't, but they all seem to point towards the fucked-up-ness of east coast suburban living, a theme Hartley has dealt with his entire career. The performances here are amusingly dead-pan, and the colors drab. If you like your hopeless romanticism with a bit of restraint, this film is for you.
