"Do you miss your kids?" - "Yes" - "Do you hate your ex-husband?" - "Sure" - "Do you want to get married again?" - "Of course".A cavalier convo between a high-school drop-out Maria (Shelly) and her divorced elder sister Peg (Falco) in TRUST, US indie hyphenate Hal Hartley's second feature, gives the gist of the vicious circle that a woman often gets entangled with, and in Hartley's quirky but roundly unconventional girl-meet-boy yarn, he will ensure that the same fate will not befall upon his protagonist Maria. Starting from its opening's drop-dead gambit, TRUST sets its deadpan timbre squarely in the center. Maria naively takes her jock boyfriend's throwaway promise of marriage for granted and gets pregnant, and obliquely is answer for her father's sudden shuffling off this mortal coil (she never knows he has a bad heart!), consequentially is frozen out by everyone else, barely getting out of harm's way from a sex pervert in a liqueur store, she falls in with Matthew (Donovan), a retiring loner but a consummate electronic repairman who has a retrograde affinity of analog over digital and prefers repairing radios over televisions (the latter causes cancer to boot), they hits it off fine, nothing remotely earth-shattering or libido-driven, by choice, Hartley brilliantly teases out the encroaching tenderness which they will grow for each other, a healthier, more humanistic and salutary type of connection between two strangers, which prods both to make some vital decisions: an abortion or keeping the baby, securing a 9 to 5 dead-end job or sticking to one's ground, getting married or stay as friends on the common ground of their mutual affection and trust. There is some bad parenting in the mix too, Matthew is in the receiving end of an abusive father (MacKay), that kind would gut-punch his own son without blinking an eye, who still rankles that Matthew's mother died of giving birth to him (called it narrow-minded or inward-looking is a criminal overstate), from where one can see where Matthew's inchoate violent proclivity comes. More enigmatically misandrist is Maria's mother Jean (played by an unknown Nelson with Janus- faced finesse between astuteness and sangfroid), whose confiding moment of the aftermath of her recent bereavement tellingly vouchsafes the heartening fact: Mr. Hartley is devoid of the usual unsavory male-chauvinism in his chromosomes. The two leads are both excellent, Adrienne Shelly has a cool girl's composure seeping through her trademark elfin air, totally sympathetic as a hapless misfit whereas a subplot entailing a snaffled infant baby singles out Maria's learning curve of motherhood and in those moments, she is unassumingly observant and grown-up. On the other hand, Martin Donovan makes great play of a vastly conflicted persona shrouded by antisocial angst but finds fondness with an unlike match, flagged up by the grenade he carries, Matthew's self-destructive predisposition has only one antidote, a sincere, real human connection based on mutual trust, isn't that what everyone wants? Shot in a shoestring budget within a meagre 11-day span, imbued with an antiseptic, blueish hue and blessed with Hartley's expressive compositions and other winning trimmings, TRUST is whimsical but not cutesy, rapier-like but never doctrinaire, earnest yet at times you can catch its knowing wink: kookiness is the new sexy, and don't forget, Harley juvenilia is made in 1990.

Marketed with the promotional tagline "A slightly twisted comedy", that is not even the half of it as this Hal Hartley film focuses on an unconventional and entirely non-sexual romance that develops between a pregnant teenager and a social misfit twice her age. Both characters curiously defy the initial impressions that they give. As the teen, Adrienne Shelly seems bratty and brainless, wearing heavy makeup and disrespecting her parents, however, she gradually becomes more dowdy after her parents and her boyfriend both reject her upon learning about the pregnancy. As the social misfit, Martin Donovan (no, not the director of 'Apartment Zero'; another Martin Donovan) seems dangerous and prone to violent outbursts, but totally submissive when around his bathroom sanity obsessed father, Donovan also shows us a beating human heart beneath the anger. The film takes a bit too long to bring the two characters together (it is a full 26 minutes before their separate plots converge), but there is a lot to like in how they trust each other for different reasons; her for his sincerity and workplace integrity and him for her genuine warmth. Hartley unnecessarily complicates things with a stolen baby subplot that awkwardly pops up every now and again without offering any real perspective on how Shelley feels about her own baby to-be. In the scenes where Hartley just lets his characters interact with each other though, the film rarely skips a beat. Rebecca Nelson is also very good as the girl's mother who goes from resenting Donovan to trying to manipulate who he likes for her own advantage.

Long Island filmmaker Hal Hartley fights the sophomore jinx in the follow-up to his disarming debut feature 'The Unbelievable Truth' (1989). His second film is an overwritten satire drawn around the usual clichés of modern suburban culture (television, dysfunctional families, etc.) and filtered through the director's trademark cast of quirky characters, none of whom resemble anyone raised in a genuine suburb. It lacks the offbeat appeal of his earlier effort, presenting a darker, more emotionally violent story about a pregnant high school dropout and her unlikely friendship with an alienated electronics whiz-kid, who carries a hand grenade "just in case". The odd, choreographed rhythm of Hartley's dialogue is still enjoyable, but this time his characters have nothing amusing to say, and the impression is left of a gifted talent trying too hard to overcome a creative block.

A father drops dead after arguing with his daughter, who's pregnant. In another house a grown man is still living at home with his father and can't clean the bathroom to suit him. Together these stories come together with vivid reality, almost too much so. Despite the feeling they seem to be getting nowhere and fast, its mature take on people's troubles and the way the two leads connect make for an intelligent and engrossing film. I don't know if I would really want to see it again, but the more the viewer thinks about it after wards, you realize just how much it makes an impression on you. The viewer is really invested in these people and that's a credit to the writers and makers of this film, which stars Adrienne Shelley and Martin Donovan and a young Edie Falco, before The Sopranos. If you want a real slice of life with an ending that's not really an ending, but just the beginning of another stage, watch this and learn about "Trust."