Surviving Desire
Director: Hal Hartley
Year Released: 1991
Rating: 1.0
* Or, Everything Hal Needed to Know About Life He Learned From Jean-Luc Godard. College professor Martin Donovan is obsessed with his one student, but she isn't sure if she's into him - meanwhile, his 'classes' consist of him contemplating a single paragraph in a Dostoyevsky novel. The Godardian elements (going from a 'regular scene' to a dance number, reading whole passages from books) make this even more self-conscious than your ordinary Hartley picture and will probably alienate anyone not aware of what he's doing (I know what he's doing and it's alienating). His films, over the years, generally say little about life and more about movies, but his two best works (Simple Men and Henry Fool) pull off the opposite.
