Trust

Director: Hal Hartley
Year Released: 1990
Rating: 3.5

Consistently quirky Hartley crafts one of the best love stories of the nineties: an electronics repairman (Martin Donovan), who lives with his abusive father, "falls for" a pregnant teenager (Adrienne Shelly) who killed her own father with her belligerence. Though there's nothing 'normal' about their union - Hartley takes creative liberties with human psychology - both Donovan and Shelly are positively dynamic together, and both are adept at Hartley's sometimes off-putting, idiosyncratic dialogue. For all intents and purposes the love affair seems doomed - Shelly's flighty, Donovan's a curmudgeon - but they find in each other a kind of purity and sympathy, and even find time to bond over trying to hunt down the husband of a suspected baby-napper. Sometimes you have to put your glasses on; sometimes you have to let the grenade go off.