African American Comedy
Animation
Black Comedy
British
Classic Comedies
Comic Criminals
Cult Classics
Documentaries, Real & Fake
Farce
Frighteningly Funny
Gay & Lesbian
General
Kids & Family
Military & War
Musicals
Parody & Spoof
Romantic Comedies
Satire
School Days
Screwball Comedy
Series & Sequels
Slapstick
Sports
Stand-Up
Teen
Television
Urban
|
 |
Surviving Desire |
List Price: $14.98
Your Price: $13.48 |
 |
|
|
|
| Product Info |
Reviews |
Features:
Description:
Surviving Desire is actually three short films, two of which--"Theory of Achievement" and "Ambition"--demonstrate writer-director Hal Hartley at his most quirky and abstract. They consist mostly of a series of dialogues, presented out of context, about things like Brooklyn real estate, nonlinear art, and contrasting male and female approaches to suicide. Fans of Hartley will enjoy them; newcomers will probably find them baffling. The third film, however--"Surviving Desire," from which the collection takes its title--is one of the most charming pieces Hartley has made. This hour-long story follows Jude (Martin Donovan), a college teacher obsessed with a single paragraph from The Brothers Karamazov, who's fallen in love with Sofie (Mary Ward), one of his students who's writing a short story about him. As the romance plays itself out, philosophical conversations turn into metaphysical Abbott and Costello routines, Jude breaks into spontaneous dance, a rock band in the street serenades a woman in her apartment window--and gradually a rueful and whimsical sense of life and love rises out of Hartley's erratic rhythms. Hartley is an idiosyncratic filmmaker who's not to everyone's taste; this short film is probably an ideal introduction to his work. Some of his movies seem to be working too hard for a sense of poetry and end up feeling stilted, but in "Surviving Desire" all of Hartley's devices take flight. --Bret Fetzer
|
|
|
|
