First Shot : Maria, a rebellious, self-centered, insolent 17-year-old girl, is making up, using the camera as a mirror. Clearly, she sees nothing and noone but herself. In two minutes, she breaks the news to her parents. She has dropped out school, she wants to Marry Anthony and she is pregnant. After a brief argument she slaps her father in the face and leaves the house. He drops dead. A rock-tune starts, as well as the credit list, giving a light touch to a tragic situation. The tone is given.
Second scene : Matthew quits his job after a fight with his boss. He appears violent, rebellious and feared. A social misfit.
Once home, we realise that, though he is in his twenties, he is constantly bullied and humiliated by his father. A bookworm, he only listens to classical music and always carries a grenade with him.
Maria, for her part, is then dumped by her boy-friend, let down by her best friend and thrown out of her house by her mother. She is now a homeless whose first reaction is to try and buy beer. She is nearly raped by the shopkeeper and ends up drinking in a dilapidated house....where she meets Matthew, gone out for a smoke.
The movie then tells their story, how they get to know each other, how they fall in love and manage to live a life of their own with psychopaths as parents.
It could be just another teen love story but it is far more than this. It is clever, funny as well as dramatic. It is both a social and economic satyre. With very little money, Hal Hartley succeeds in making a powerful work, with such an original tone that it could then rival with Jarmusch's movies as a landmark in independant cinema.
Everything works in this film !
You can analyse the names and their relation with characters (Matthew Slaughter, nurse Payne, Jean..). You can see how scenes and even dialogues are repeated and sometimes reversed.
You can remark the special effect Maria has on men, how they fall when she appears or start to talk.
You can compare the last shot with the first one and see what it tells you about Maria.
You can scrutinize the theme of trust.
Most of all, you can just sit and enjoy a great movie and wonder why its director has not been given more consideration. After all, there is a great line of H.H. In American cinema from Howard Hawks to Henry Hathaway, not mentioning the unequalled Taiwanese director Hou Hsao Hsien and his triple H !
Eventually you can have a thought for Adrienne Shelly, a remarkable actress, who was muredered in New York in her early fourties, as she was about to direct her first movie.