Surviving Desire

Stars: Martin Donovan (Trust), Mary Ward (Hangin' With the Homeboys). Made for American Playhouse between his debut 1990 film The Unbelievable Truth and his more recent entries Trust and Simple Men, Hal Hartley's Surviving Desire is a would-be comedy about an English professor named Jude (Martin Donovan, and, yes, all the literary references in this film are intended) who falls in love with one of his students (Mary Ward). As Jude, who can't seem to move beyond one particularly rich passage in Dostoyevsky, flounders in the classroom, he becomes more and more enamored of Sophie (Ward). The problems start when they begin to talk. Utilizing a Hartley trademark, the characters rarely speak to each other directly: it's more like they're talking to themselves out loud very rapidly (a technique used to great effect in Trust but a huge dud here). Those who do not have a fairly good handle on literature, philosophy, and the writings of early theologians will find themselves drowning in a sea of unfamiliar allusions. Clocking in at just under an hour, Surviving Desire seems longer. It's the immature work of a gifted director who (in this film) has not yet hit his comic stride (the timing in many potentially funny scenes is embarrassingly bad). To add insult to injury, the Surviving Desire video contains not one, but two, experimental shorts made by the filmmaker as a novice: "The Theory of Achievement" and "Ambition." Let's be charitable and say that they both come across exactly as early film student works (meaning that they're about as much as fun as reading one of Hemingway's student papers that he wrote for Shakespeare class.) Audience: The desperately trendy.