Don’t be mistaken, what I’ve written here for Maria, is a tale of spiritual transcendence. Maria’s break with the world, her crisis, occurs when she realizes she has accidentally killed her father. This is also the brutal culmination of a day of hard-to-take realities. She has been brought low. She can now see the world for exactly what it is. She has become enlightened. She sees the vanity and pointlessness of human ambition. And begins to transcend these things. That’s her physicality, the physicality of the saint, the person without: simple, relaxed, patient, the clarity of decision and movement. 

Hal Hartley, interviewed by Martin Donovan in 1992 on Trust