“Trust” (1990)
The similarities between Hal Hartley’s sophomore film and his debut are immediately obvious: “Trust,” like “The Unbelievable Truth,” stars Adrienne Shelly as a recent high school grad, the unexpectedly pregnant Maria, who forms an odd relationship with a brooding young man with violence in his past — in this case Matthew, played by Martin Donovan in his breakout role. But while what were fast becoming Hartley’s trademarks are very much in evidence, the film is funnier, more moving, more technically adept and generally more fully formed than its predecessor. Shelly is again superb, and has a ton of chemistry with Donovan, who comes across as a kind of Generation X James Dean, walking around with a live hand grenade that he’s continuously tempted to detonate. The pair fall somewhere between Bonnie and Clyde and Romeo and Juliet, with their awful families (including excellent turns from Merritt Nelson as Maria’s mother, who challenges Matthew to a drinking contest, Edie Falco as her divorced sister, and John MacKay as Matthew’s OCD father) working hard to keep them apart. The title is absolutely apt: in a world where Maria sees a woman try to snatch a baby and is nearly raped by a store clerk, they’re united, despite their differences, by the fact that they can trust in each other absolutely. Hartley would move away from this template after this film, and it’s understandable: it’s hard to imagine him getting it more right than he does here. [A-]
“Surviving Desire” (1991)
Originating as a TV featurette (Hartley’s first) that clocks in at under 60 minutes, it’s tempting to overlook “Surviving Desire” — essentially a tight series of vignettes — as an early minor project in Hal Hartley’s body of work. Taking cues from Robert Bresson and Jean-Luc Godard and utilizing a veritable grab bag of literary and film references from Fyodor Dostoyevsky to “West Side Story,” Hartley was cementing what were to become his filmic signatures, including his non-naturalistic dialogue.
“Surviving Desire” follows a floundering literary professor (Donovan again, the frequent anti-hero of Hartley’s films) as he falls into that kind of obsessive surface love, known as limerance, with one of his students, the removed and ambitious Sofie (Mary B. Ward). What their relationship lacks in physical connection they make up for in a banter that is, naturally for Hartley, short, sharp and ratatat-esque with its quips. The narrative non-sequiturs peppered throughout the film, such as the silent choreographed dance that expresses Jude’s joy at his burgeoning romance and the live appearance by the band The Great Outdoors serenading a giggling girl on the street, are just some of the ways Hartley plays with form and lifts the serious tone of the film. Employing a lot of $10 words, but also a sly, stylish sense of fun, “Surviving Desire” is a passionate examination of big ideas, including faith, ambition and the dangers of the over-examined love life. [A-]
“Simple Men” (1992)
Hartley’s third feature and in many ways his international breakthrough (it was his first to play in Cannes), “Simple Men” also contains the sequence that is perhaps most emblematic of his career: the infamous “Kool Thing” dance number (set to the Sonic Youth song) that seemingly comes out of nowhere and invests the film with an early Godardian zest that is as invigorating as it was perhaps unnecessary: the movie was already kicking ass! Two brothers, one a small time hood (Robert Burke), the other a naive student fresh out of college (Bill Sage), go on a motorcycle road trip into the wilds of Long Island in search of their father. Once a great shortstop for the long-since-relocated Brooklyn Dodgers who subsequently became an anarchist, at the film’s beginning, Dad has just escaped from prison. The two brothers get stranded in an off-the-beaten path community near a roadside diner/gas station and slowly get pulled involved with the locals: their feuds, their love lives. Indeed, one brother finds love, although having had his heart broken mid-robbery during the film’s opening scene, he’s vowed to break the heart of the next woman he falls in love with. Watching it again twenty years on, one is struck both by the home-made quality the film exhibits and by how accessible it is; despite his famous po-mo verbal pyrotechnics and occasionally disorienting film grammar, it remains a surprisingly pleasant, heady melodrama full of genuine laughs and the melancholy of spurned filial affection. [A-]