Trust in Love (2024)

a 2024 Vashon Island Film Festival review

Plucky Trust in Love Surfs an Emotionally Authentic Wave of Familiar Familial Strife

Can a single element save a film from disaster? That’s certainly the case with the plucky indie drama Trust in Love. Writer and lead actor Jimi Petulla and director Mick Davis have crafted a rudimentary soap opera of familial dysfunction overflowing in one clichéd moment after another. However, the core elements are based on truth. Better yet, they break through all of the melodramatic sludge with surprising effectiveness. As many times as I rolled my eyes, there were countless more when my heartstrings were effectively tugged, my funny bone whimsically tickled. Most importantly, my affections were tenderly won over.

But the best part? That one element that kept everything from surfing a bad wave and wiping out: a sensational father-son saga of acceptance, togetherness, and love that overflows in surprisingly intimate universal truths. No matter how absurd events may become or how one subplot impolitely crashes into another, the emotional foundation remains cathartically strong. This allows this project to resonate on a deeply personal level. It is also what makes watching it worthwhile.

Legendary Malibu music producer Mickey Ferrera (Petulla) feels like his life has smashed into a tidal wave. After 18 years of marriage, his much younger wife Sofia (Natasha Wilson) has asked for a divorce. That would be bad enough, but his eldest daughter, Jennifer (Sydney Bullock), is also dealing with teenage peer pressure while also concealing a not-so-secret crush on her equestrian coach Brian (Jeremiah Blakle). Then there’s Mickey’s son Cody (Logan Arditty). A budding artist, he’s developed a romantic interest in one of his (male) classmates, and a pair of his school’s most noxious bullies have uncovered his secret.

Topping it all off? The record Mickey is producing for a once proud rock band is going nowhere, and it’s frustratingly dawning on all those in the recording studio that the quartet’s best days are slowly vanishing on the horizon like a California sunset.

One of the best ideas Davis and Petulla had was to cast their picture with a bevy of amateur actors, talented newcomers, and veteran musicians (who are either playing themselves or purposeful variations on their public personas). They’ve also allowed a laid-back, laissez-faire California attitude to permeate the production. Think of The Dude (The Big Lebowski) or Jeff Spicoli (Fast Times at Ridgemont High) and you’ll get what I mean. There’s something refreshingly distinctive about this that’s happily disarming.

And don’t get me started on the cinematography. Viorel Sergovici’s camerawork is nothing short of outstanding.

A handful of the story elements are noticeably rough. Almost everything concerning Mickey and Sofia’s divorce falls flat. As events are seen almost entirely from his perspective, some of what transpires between the duo can come across as decidedly one-sided. This has the unintentional side effect of sugarcoating much of the naturally unpleasant complications that arise when two people try to deal amicably with a situation such as this, only to have animosity and distrust worm their way into the proceedings. Sofia’s journey feels entirely in service of Mickey’s, and this keeps her from manufacturing an interior life of her own outside of his long shadow.

It’s how the narrative deals with the pair’s children where everything comfortably hangs ten. Bullock is quite good as Jennifer. While her character’s subplots don’t have tons of emotive staying power or dramatic zest, the young actress still makes a strong impression. A scene at the equestrian stable in which she inadvertently learns a demoralizing truth about Brian is unexpectedly heart-stopping, while playfully quiet moments with Petulla or Wilson showcase spunky charm.

But it is events involving Cody’s heartrendingly befuddled coming out where Petulla’s screenwriting soars and Davis’s confident direction perfectly augments what’s happening to the teenager. It’s often hard to watch, and those easily triggered by hate speech and homophobic violence (both physical and psychological) will undoubtedly want to look away. Nonetheless, the effortless, cathartic beauty of how Cody and Mickey communicate caught me by surprise.

There’s this terrific scene, not too long after the son sits down and timorously reveals what he’s been dealing with to a father finally ready to put all distractions aside and listen, where any indifference or vitriol I may have felt disappeared. Mickey takes Cody to chat with one of his friends, drag performer Lucy the Magi (Alberto Davila Jr.), and a brief moment that could have become a stereotypical, clichéd disaster ends up anything but. The whole sequence, no more than maybe five minutes, overflows in authenticity, and all three actors achieve a level of relaxed intimacy that speaks volumes.

This drama does have its issues. It does not help that the climax is like something out of a 1970s television movie of the week, goofily mawkish and dripping in sentimentality. I also wasn’t a fan of how Mickey and Sofia’s divorce resolved itself, its tidiness coming perilously close to being insulting.

No matter. Where it counts most, the film gets almost everything right: the interactions between devoted parents and their hurting children, who try to act as if they stoically understand what is happening but on the inside are crumbling to pieces. For that reason — and in some respects, that reason alone — Trust in Love won me over. I say give it a look.

– Review reprinted courtesy of the SGN in Seattle

Film Rating: 2½ (out of 4)