SURVIVING DESIRE

DISCOVERY:
Hal Hartley's Surviving Desire  (1992), first appeared on PBS’s American Playhouse.

OPENING SCENE:
Surviving Desire opens with a college literature professor reading from The Brothers Karamazov to his class: 

I believe that 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. Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself. What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself. Avoid fear, too, though fear is only the consequence of every sort of falsehood. Never be frightened at your own faintheartedness in attaining love. Don't be frightened over much even at your own evil actions. I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love, Active love is labor and fortitude...

—Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

This is what the film is all about. In fact, every Hartley film deals with this theme. 

PLOT:
Surviving Desire is about just that. Jude is a school teacher who falls in love with a lovely lass in his class. She succumbs to him and then shirks him. He is blinded by his own desire. He is a reader and teacher. She is a writer and student. He is researching life, she is reporting on it. The desire Jude is surviving is the desire of carpe diem, "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may."  

Does our hero grow in this film? I wonder.

Here the men are victors and victims. The women, seductive and sly. 

FINALE:
The film ends gracefully. In true classical tragic form: Our hero rises with hubris, and falls with humility.

Martin Donovan and Mary Ward

CREDITS:
54:00(?)     USA      1992    English     color
Directed by: Hal Hartley 
Written by: Hal Hartley

Credits  courtesy of The Internet Movie Database.

PERIOD/LOCATION:
A contemporary piece, presumably set in the 1980's. Any College, U.S.A.

CINEMATIC SIMILARITIES:
Stylistically similar to director/writer David Mamet's (House of Games; Things Change; Homicide) style (i.e., meaty dialogue).  

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z  Numerical

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