Surviving Desire 1991

Sophie won't tell anyone she's sleeping with her professor. He's young, handsome, and passionate - perfect for Sophie, who just wants to write about love. When they hook up, he drops everything and her notebook begins to fill with poetry. But while he's head-over-heels, she's about to write two important words: The End. Surviving Desire captures that dizzy feeling of love in one's twenties, an off-beat comic romance classic.

In regards to Surviving Desire, knowing Dostoevsky's biography, and having read his works, helps place the emotive trials and trails in this comedy. I've now seen all Hal Hartley’s films, and this is my favorite, I really think that Hart Hartley was one of the best indie directors, unfortunately he has remained unknown and underappreciated.  The gazes of the actors, their static quality, is more nuanced here than in meanwhile or trust. This film is compassionate to its characters in a way that is inspiring. The dance scene is captivating and goofy at the same time it is inspired on Godard’s Band of Outsiders famous dance scene. The period stage sets, and costumes were all very chummy. The dialogue's complexity made it a fun film. 

Surviving Desire is, on paper, an underwhelming prospect; a mere 53-minutes long, it began life as a made-for-TV special. However, don’t let its brevity and inauspicious origins put you off. Whether you view it as a televisual gem, a substantial short or masterful mini feature it is worth your time and money – being as it is a key work of the formidably talented Hal Hartley.

Surviving Desire opens brilliantly on an under siege professor, Jude (Hartley regular Martin Donovan), as he reads to his class from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “I believe you are sincere and good at heart. If you do not attain happiness, always remember that you are on the right road, and try not to leave it…” A rebellious, swaggering electric guitar score accompanies his lecture. A book flies at Jude, thrown by an unseen hand.

Quick as a flash, he turns on his heel and hurls his chalk back, the soundtrack has the unlikely missile whipping through the air with audibly improbable ferocity; nailing the perpetrator with an almighty thwack. It comically transpires that his braying, seditious class have been infuriatingly stuck on this same paragraph for over a month – they implore him to teach them something, anything. The classroom scene climaxes with Jude flinging a disruptive student aside before being assaulted from the wings -- violence which is explicitly played for laughs. So far, so bizarre. Welcome to the Hartleyville USA.

Before 1991, the year in which Surviving Desire appeared, Hal Hartley had directed several shorts and two excellent idiosyncratic features, The Unbelievable Truth (1989) and Trust (1990). Right from the off, Hartley presented a signature style and themes which would then reoccur throughout his work. Surviving Desire, as with the features that came before, is a star-crossed lovers’ drama with an overt absurdist streak. In it Jude attempts to woo his only committed student Sophie (Mary Ward), whilst, as is again characteristic for Hartley heroes, grappling with career dissatisfaction and a larger existential crisis. At one point he frustratingly comments, “shouldn’t knowledge provide solace?”

Those familiar with Hartley’s oeuvre will recognize the familiar traits: the impossibly smart-arse characters, both central and peripheral. Be they academics, those in the service industry or tramps they are, to a man or woman, prone to gnomic philosophizing and self- and peer analysis; almost as if speaking with one subversive voice. A coolly existential brand of wisdom pervades every scene and springs from the mouth of every character. In Surviving Desire, after hearing about Jude’s infatuation with Sophie, a barman proffers, “that’s the trouble with us Americans, we always want a tragedy with a happy ending.”

This shtick means his work exudes both a swaggering air of hipster cool whilst proudly displaying, like a peacock, his considerable smarts. Characters are self-aware enough to mock themselves as they pontificate and there is a deadpan melodrama to the romance. When told that he’ll never survive the liaison with his student Jude answers, “I don’t know I want to.”

Hartley has an almost theatrical rejection of naturalism both in terms of dialogue and narrative. As mentioned above, violence is played for humour and events often take a surreal turn -- as when Jude wanders past a band (The Great Outdoors) who have ‘set up shop’ in the street and are playing to a woman, stands giggling while looking at a window above the band. Also, inspired by the first flushes of romantic excitement, Jude performs a West Side Story-esque dance with two random men joining him in absurdly perfect synchronicity.

With regards to his actors and the laconic, too-cool-for-school performances he coaxes from them, Hartley traditionally reminds them less is more. Martin Donovan is perhaps the ultimate Hal Hartley hero -- and he is superb here -- but Mary Ward, as impish and charming as she is, lacks the edge of some of his other female collaborators. Although Sophia is a typical early Hartley heroine -- young, rebellious, beautiful and on a quest to prove herself intellectually – his first major heroine, the late Adrienne Shelly (the radiant star of The Unbelievable Truth and Trust) left a long shadow over all his subsequent collaborations with actresses.

Hal Hartley specializes in an inspired marriage of the ordinary and the extraordinary; the sublime falling from the mouths of slackers. His films may be an acquired taste but it’s one I’d urge you to indulge because ultimately you’ll find yourself, like his hopelessly romantic characters, tumbling head over heels.

is a deadpan melodrama to the romance. When told that he’ll never survive the liaison with his student Jude answers, “I don’t know I want to.”

Characters talk about tedious tasks with the same dreamy intensity that characterizes their discussions of love, literature and philosophy. The mundane and the highbrow are hilariously intertwined within strands of dialogue, as when Jude tells his friend Henry, “You can’t walk in, use my toaster, and start spouting universal truths without qualification.” When Jude (no coincidence of course that his name in itself carries considerable dramatic weight) lies down in the gutter in abject despair, he is interrupted by a man asking for directions. The result is both dryly comic and gives Hartley’s films an intensely soulful, totally unique character.

In Hartley’s films repetition is a mechanism, it’s fear, it’s pleasure — is the essence of his work. Aggressively, a father will challenge his son to "repeat what he just said", the characters quote each other, in and out of context, there are fragments of phrases taken from books that appear and disappear throughout the narration. Often, repetition has a spiral effect: it helps a protagonist to define his thoughts (that is, for Hartley, his relationship with the world), either in a context of friendly ties between men (as in Theory of Achievement, when two friends finally write the sentence that best describes them, having tried multiple variants by adding a new adjective every time: “young, middle class, white, university graduate, unqualified, no money, drunk… I think now we achieve ”) or through direct confrontation (Jude, the professor of literature in Surviving Desire, is violently attacked by a male student for having been a month and a half with the same paragraph of the Karamazov brothers by Dostoyevsky). Something even more disturbing is that the man feels bewildered by a phrase pronounced by a woman and begins to repeat it, with the vain hope of discovering her secret. On the part of the women, the repetition - although threatening at the beginning - finally dissipates to reveal, underneath it all, a more bitter truth.

The repetition to convince oneself of the truth (incredible or not) or to get the "trust" of others: Hartley's films show the effects of language on life, the psyche, the body of its protagonists. His characters constantly carry books and read them aloud, like Anna Karina in Alphaville, from Godard. However the compulsion to read as well as the failed mechanism of repetition has another origin: an unpaid debt. The murder of a father, the death of a mother in giving birth to her son, the frustrated hopes that parents place in their children, the failures of the lives of adults who pass from one generation to the next — the films of Hartley are full of rebellious teenagers, brutal parents, psychopaths or cowards, incompetent adults, young people angered by the stupidity of the ruling class, frustrated ambitions, intelligent people who suffer in the narrowness of degrading jobs.

Beyond the horrors that are hidden in the ideal world of a family and the suffocating boredom of the suburbs, one must give an account of something else: for being young, prosperous, American; in other words, someone whose lifestyle is, in some way, responsible, for example, of an impending nuclear holocaust.

The vagueness of the debt makes everything even more unbearable. Did Mary really kill her father? Is Matthew's father a tyrant who exploits his son, or is Matthew a taciturn young man, difficult and ungrateful? Is it true that "we should never be afraid of our pusillanimity to find love," as Jude asserts when quoting Dostoyevsky? And why does the adjective "drunk" appear immediately after the two friends, in Theory of Achievement, agree with the word "white"? It is not possible to be accountable for being young, being bored in the suburbs, furious in New York, angry with your parents and more than anything, for not being able to love.

Hartley's cinema is relentlessly dynamic. It never succumbs to the fascination of the beauty of its images, impeccable symmetry, perfect resolutions — which, as film theory states, "stop the narration" to replace it with aesthetic contemplation. His stories constantly ride on a difficult balance, so they continue to capture our attention.

Hartley's love stories cannot be interpreted in a vacuum: Jude makes Sophie uncomfortable by insisting that her relationship must be "accepted" by the outside world: the gaze of the Other is what sanctions the validity of what happens. In other words, the lives of the characters are determined, sutured, "framed" by what lurks off the screen: the hidden mechanism of fate, the crazy machinery of the bachelor who blames irregularly, the sins attributed not only to the father, but to a society on the verge of bankruptcy.

Hartley's protagonists are a type of modern Oedipus who fight to face love, social responsibility, the crisis of faith, while a giant shadow of catastrophe looms over them. Women, also caught in the conflict, are partly victims, sexual objects, and sphinxes; their very presence questions, disrupts the complacent development of male discourse. While they are no less "lost" than their male partners, they appear to have access to a different level of knowledge. Swinging gracefully between irony, urban despair and romanticism, Hartley's films are rigorous, elegant, and fascinating stories about pure impossibility and the absolute necessity of love.

immediately after the two friends, in Theory of Achievement, agree with the word "white"? It is not possible to be accountable for being young, being bored in the suburbs, furious in New York, angry with your parents and more than anything, for not being able to love.

Directed by Hal Hartley

Produced by Jerome Brownstein, Ted Hope

Written by Hal Hartley

Starring: Martin Donovan, Julie Kessler, Matt Malloy, Merritt Nelson, Mary B. Ward

Music by The Great Outdoors, Hal Hartley (as Ned Rifle)

Cinematography Michael Spiller

Edited by Hal Hartley