Viewing Log #2: Surviving Desire (Hal Hartley, 1991)

Having seen three of Hal Hartley's feature films (Trust, Simple Men, and Henry Fool) and an extraordinary short (Ambition) I'm convinced that he's one of the most original American filmmakers of the nineties. I've read that his more recent work is not quite at the level of his early output, but I look forward to watching some of those films (No Such Thing and The Girl from Monday in particular) sometime soon. Surviving Desire, a film Hartley made in 1991 which clocks in at under an hour, fits in nicely with his other works made around that time. It stars Martin Donovan as Jude, a college literature professor teaching Dostoevsky to a mostly apathetic class in which, however, is also seated Sofie (Mary B. Ward), a pretty girl with short hair who seems to actually care about the stuff he is babbling about. Jude endlessly goes over the same paragraph from The Brothers Karamazov ("It's an important paragraph," he says). Over the course of this tightly-constructed film, Jude and Sofie strike up a relationship which we only get to witness through small scenes like Jude going over to the bookstore where Sofie works. What most interests me about Hartley's films, something which is illustrated throughout Surviving Desire, is the role ideas play in his works. For all the intellectual wordplay to be found in the films of a Stillman or a Baumbach, their focus is always a narrative one, whereas for Hartley, in the subtly stylized world where his films take place, what matters are the ideas themselves, so that the characters, whose expression is almost always a blank one, are there solely to deliver the ideas and sometimes contrast them with other ideas. There's a great scene where Jude is talking to his friend, who works at the same bookstore as Sofie, precisely about the value of living in an imaginary world of books and ideas as opposed to the real world ("My biggest fear is this, that all my hard work, all my good intentions, all my studying, have been nothing more than the building of a wall between me and life," Jude says). It's a strange moment, and not an uncommon one in Hartley's films, one which seems to distance us completely from any sort of emotional involvement with these characters (just are the characters themselves are disconnected from their own lives, commenting on it rather than living it). But then usually something equally strange happens in a Hartley movie: you get adjusted to the rhythm of the film and its dialogues, the movement of the characters through these unimpressive environments and suddenly it all doesn't seem so abstract. You get an intimation of something sweet, sad, and, most importantly, thoroughly human beneath the surface.