Trust

Maria says she is pregnant in high school, causes her father's death and is thrown out of the house. The same day she meets Matthew, who has walked out of his job and carries a hand grenade. Two people with nowhere to go hold on to each other. Hal Hartley wrote and directed. Adrienne Shelly plays Maria, Martin Donovan plays Matthew. The film is one of the clearest instances of Hartley's style: flatly delivered lines, an instruction to act without affect, strangely literary dialogue and frozen framing. That distance keeps contradicting the weight of the subject, and the humour comes out of the gap. The title is the subject: what binds these two is not love but a test of trust. The grenade sits in the story as its concrete form. It won a screenwriting award at Sundance and counts among the founding films of nineties American independent cinema. The part remains the most remembered work of Adrienne Shelly's career. Who it is for: viewers who like American independent film and stylised dialogue. Who it is not for: anyone wanting naturalistic acting; the film refuses it on purpose.