Trust - Blindes Vertrauen

I first saw this film in 1990 while I was in college and I loved it. I watched it over and over on VHS. I told everyone that this was my favorite movie of all time and watched every Hal Hartley movie I could find. Last night I stumbled across Trust on Netflix Instant and I thought I'd check it out to see if this film that I was so passionate about when I was 20 years old held up over time or if the 40 year old me would find it silly or dated. To my surprise I was blown away all over again by how ridiculously great it is. The smart stylized dialog, the music, the starkness, the silences, the camera framing, all of the whacked out but fully human characters, Martin Donovan and Adrienne Shelly so young and beautiful. As the final, simple, beautiful, frame of the film disappeared and credits rolled I was left sitting on the couch in a state of shocked amazement at the effect this film still has on me. Hands down my favorite movie of all time!

When high school dropout Maria Coughlin (Adrienne Shelly) announces her pregnancy to her parents, her father drops dead on the floor. Her mother kicks her out of the house and her boyfriend dumps her, so Maria is left alone and homeless.

Martin Donovan really excels here and represents a type of person some of us know all too well. The man who rebels against the world, but in a sort of passive-aggressive, nihilistic fashion. It is interesting that this film came out in 1990, as the 90s were very much a nihilistic decade for film and music, and the character of Matthew Slaughter sort of anticipates that.

Hal Hartley may not be as well known as Jim Jarmusch or (early) Richard Linklater, but he has that same independent vibe. He has done here for Long Island what Linklater did for Austin.

I didn't understand it right after the first viewing, but 'Trust' certainly is of Hal Hartley's finest works, excelled only by the somewhat more conventional drama 'Henry Fool'. As with many other of Hartley's earlier works, it takes a while to let the film sink into you. But with the second viewing one starts to appreciate the film's subtilities, both the dry absurd humour and the fine, deeply compassionate portraits of the characters.

The story starts up with a scene typical for Hartley: rebellious teenager Maria Coughlin informs her parents that not only will she drop out of high school, she is also pregnant. A quarrel takes place, and when her father calls her 'slut' she slaps him in the face. He drops down dead. The movie can begin.

Things get ugly for Maria. Her boyfriend, a chauvinist pig, leaves her when she informs him that she's pregnant, claiming he's not the father anyway. And at home her mother waits for her and coolly claims that since Maria's killed her husband, she is now forever in her mother's debt and have to work for her. Never again will she do housework... This is when she meets up with Matthew Slaughter, a truly gifted engineer but with a somewhat sociopathic behaviour, and filled to the brim with anger and hatered.

Martin Donovan truly does an outstanding portrait of Matthew, and perfectly manages to forge his paradoxal feelings of extreme anger and vulnerability into a fully working unit.

A deeply moving story of two scarred, somewhat maladjusted souls manage to find each other, told in a low-key mood that doesn't get to you immediately. But eventually it does, and when it does...you're hooked.

8/10

I caught this movie on the television network Bravo. I didn't see the very beginning but found myself glued to the machinations of the Matthew Slaughter character. I felt the performance of Martin Donavan was wonderful and I enjoyed the odd way the characters spoke with one another. The lines were rapid-fire, almost like "Moonlighting", but with a different nuance which I can't quite put my finger on. The movie was funny, but the best word for it is "interesting". It truly was a movie unlike any other I had seen, with a Coen Brothers sense of humor. I wish I knew more people who had seen it, because it is a movie that warrants discussion afterward.

I saw this one when I was working in a small movie theater as a student back in 1991 in Leuven, Belgium. I cannot explain why but this little gem of a movie touched me and I fell in love with all the characters (specially the main ones played by Adrienne Shelly and Martin Donovan), the modest soundtrack (loved the synthesizer score at the end), the dialogs, the humor mixed with social and realistic situations. Now, 23 years later, I had the chance to rediscover this movie by accident through a local internet movie site and honestly, after having seen hundreds of movies in all genres during the passed years, it still remains my favorite movie of all times. Thank you, Mr Hartley! One from the heart!