Surviving Desire

You either like Hal Hartley's specific, offbeat, deadpan brand of filmmaking, or you don't; me, I tend to like it more than not, but "Surviving Desire" is really more like a bridge between his full-length projects. It's a slight yet amusing exercise in wordplay and verbal one-upmanship. There is not much more to say about it, because that's pretty much it: 4-5 people playing word games for 54 minutes. Some of the lines are quite insightful, like one about why Donovan chooses not to believe in anything. **1/2 out of 4.

I consider this film to be one of the undiscovered gems of the 90's, and I'd rank it among Hartley's 3 best works (along with "Trust" and his masterpiece: "Henry Fool"). The short running time shouldn't detract from its stature. (It's too long to be a "short", too short to be a "feature"...think of it as a novella on celluloid.) The dialogue is Hartley at his most deft and agile, the chemistry between the leads is magnificent, and the film is inventive and original at every turn, taking us into brilliant culdesacs and then returning us to the narrative with an easy grace. Quite simply, it's one of my all-time favorites, and I watch it at least once or twice a year on an old VHS copy, which I've nearly worn out. I love this movie.

Tight, intelligent, witty, original. One of Hartleys very best films perfectly executed.. The culmination of his craft.

As Hartley goes through and destroys most of the cliches of traditional love stories, from Shakespeare (with the drunken KATE scene, ref. The Taming of the Shrew) to the musically challenged dance number by Donovan and two extras (a gem which turns all those Hollywood musical numbers on their head. What happens when you're in a funk about a frustrating and failing relationship and you don't feel like singing in the rain?)

I've found that with any director with a very unique but overtly quirky vision (Anderson, Jarmusch, and now Hartley) I'm at first immensely charmed by them but my enthusiasm wears thin with time as the quirks begin to feel less like quirks and more like cliches of the auteur's own creation; it's somewhat ironic that filmmakers who once felt so original can begin to feel more and more like caricatures as they further emphasize what made them original. The films from them that I take to most are likely to be the ones I see first, which might mean that my ambivalence towards this movie is more my problem than it is Hartley's. But I also still love Trust, so there must be something that connected with me there that's absent here- and I think this kind of auteur often forgets what it is that made their films connect with people and an over-reliance on their established style can become a copout, especially the quirky styles that have a tendency to undercut emotionally resonant moments (there are moments however where a film's quirks can allow it to express something in a purer way than a more grounded film is capable of; Jude's dance scene after he realizes he's in love was wonderful).