Given extensive cinematic release after its completion in spring 1989, Strapless was finally screened three yean later on Channel 4. It was, however, written alongside The Secret Rapture and features Blair Brown, to whom The Secret Rapture was dedicated. Although quite different in period and style, Strapless is Hare's most unambiguously optimistic film and can be seen as a culmination of his search for belief.

As images of crumbling statues, of ‘dying blooms, mists in the mountains’ (p. 1) give way, Strapless opens to reveal a woman, Lillian Hempel, standing before a statue of the Madonna in a Catholic church. When she drops her handkerchief, a smartly dressed man kneels beside her and picks it up. The title song ‘When I fall in love’ ends as the camera focuses on his face gazing up at her. What Raymond Forbes, an ambiguous but apparently successful entrepreneur, is doing in this church is, like so much about him, never to be explained, but this is a carefully placed set of associations establishing that Raymond worships her and that romance is the context of the coming story.

From the outset it is also made clear that, whatever is to come, these people – unlike the faithful praying around them – take no sustenance from religion. It is said to be obscure that just by dying in some way Christ would make everyone's life better (p. 2).