Unbelievable Truth, The

This film is not currently available on DVD. Film Description Stylish independent first feature from Hartley, one of the funniest and best from the 80s American Independent scene.

Film Details Director Hal Hartley Starring Adrienne Shelly   Country USA Language ENGLISH   Year 1989

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Review by Mike McCahill on 2nd March 2004

One of the first and funniest in the late 80s wave of American independent features, this typically skewed Hal Hartley comedy arrived at the end of the Star Wars and Chernobyl decade, and still strikes chords today, with a heroine who worries “everybody has a nuclear capability” and that the world could go boom in an instant. Long Island teenager Audry (Adrienne Shelly) is only distracted from her study of Government fall-out statistics by Josh (Robert Burke), the tall man in black she bumps into at the library, who could be a priest, mechanic, mass murderer, or all of the above.

Basically a series of character vignettes which would border on melodrama if the actors’ fundamental stillness wasn’t contradicting their words, this is a spare, elliptical narrative held together by deadpan title cards and nervy, staccato bursts of dialogue which somehow seem to reflect the panic in the air. It’s the type of film Godard would have been making around this period if he wasn’t so hung up on the death of cinema: a love story in which a man who has nothing tries to win the heart of a girl from the clutches of the more materialistic men around him, The Unbelievable Truth so clearly aspires to the status of French literature that Hartley even names Audry’s
father Victor Hugo.

The gag is that this is the kind of small community where everyone permanently fears or threatens the worst but nothing ever really happens. It ends as it begins, not with a full-stop but with a question mark, maintaining the general tenor of uncertainty (“They wouldn’t drop the bomb on a weekend, would they?”), and setting up a decade’s worth of unpredictable, leftfield, low-budget filmmaking, in which you never could quite see what was coming over the horizon.

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Article - "Hal Hartley" by Peter Wild
Tuesday 1st January 2002

I remember reading an interview with Hal Hartley years ago in which he quoted Hitchcock's famous criticism of Charles Laughton (Hitchcock dismissively said Charles Laughton was "an amateur"). When Hitchcock's criticism got back to Laughton, he just shrugged and said,...  View article in full

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Promising Directorial Debuts

Including: Alien 3, Amores Perros, Angel (1982), Badlands, Being John Malkovich, Bleak Moments, Blood Simple, Bottle Rocket, Breathless (Godard, 1959), Citizen Kane.

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