Cinema
Trust
Hal Hartley · 1990
Synopsis
Long Island. Maria Coughlin, seventeen, tells her parents that she has left high school, that she is pregnant by her boyfriend Anthony and that she is going to marry him. Her father calls her a slut; she slaps him, and he dies of a heart attack. Anthony leaves her, and her mother, who blames her for the father's death, throws her out. Matthew Slaughter, a brilliant and unstable electronics repairman, who lives with a brutal father and keeps on him a grenade brought back from Korea, finds her asleep in an abandoned house and takes her home with him.
Context
The budget is given as six hundred and ten thousand pounds by one source, and as a million and a half dollars by another. The film was shot partly in Lindenhurst, the town where Hartley grew up, as well as in Smithtown and Huntington, with actors he found again from one shoot to the next, such as Martin Donovan and Adrienne Shelly. It is the second of a run of three feature films shot between 1989 and 1992. Its screenplay received in 1991 the screenwriting award of the Sundance festival, shared with another film.
Who it is for
A film running one hour forty-seven minutes, with stylised dialogue and deliberately restrained acting, for those who accept a deadpan humour.
Prizes and reception
Winner of the screenplay prize at Sundance in 1991, it was released in France in February 1992 and re-released in cinemas in 2019.
Sources for this page 12
The pages consulted to check this page.