“I believe you are sincere, and good at heart”, intones a handsome, firm-jawed, nerdily-dressed man (Jude, played by Martin Donovan) as he paces next to a blackboard. The title Surviving Desire flashes on a black screen, and a ragged minor indie-guitar chord rings out. “If you do not attain happiness, remember that you are on the right road”, Jude continues; the black screen returns to display A FILM BY HAL HARTLEY, and we hear books being thrown. “Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falsehood to yourself”, Jude continues, ducking and flinching, having been hit in the back by a flying Brothers Karamazov.

His college class is angry, and not, it seems, randomly: “We’ve been working on this passage for six weeks!”, complains a curly-haired young man with glasses. “It’s an important passage”, Jude huffs, and he continues reading it, half turned-around, in the shielded safety of the desk in front of an attentive soft-eyed girl. He then presses the angry curly-haired guy to read it, which – in a brief, wrenching retreat from total rebellion – he does, rapid and sing-song. (The soundtrack plays, over him, a reading of the same passage in the unseen voice of an infomercial announcer.) Asked to reflect on it, Curly sneers “It’s goood advice, maaaaan”. “Is it?”, asks Jude; the class, very clearly, will go even further downhill from here.

The class would prefer a mediocre teaching assistant – “Tell us something that will help us pass the final exam!” – to this truly bad and hopeless T.A., and they have a point. (Though the soft-eyed girl, Sophie, finds herself appreciating Dostoyevsky for the first time; “the questions help?”, Jude will ask her, surprised.) But for better or worse, good advice or bad, Jude, like most Hal Hartley characters, avoids falsehood, especially to himself. Surviving Desire, and the disc’s excellent 17-minute bonus film Theory of Achievement, are movies about a few smart but marginal people who can’t or won’t tell themselves the little lies needed to function in the world each day … even though they have no more credentials than the rest of us to figure out what truth might be.

(This can be a grad-student slacker principle, but equally a religious one; the New Testament is quoted as often as any other book in this movie.)

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This quest makes romance less romantic. “Henry, I think I’m in love”, Jude will tell his homeless PhD-in-theology-pursuing friend over drinks. “How can you tell?”, Henry asks, looking at Jude with interest; “Mood swings”, Jude replies, staring vaguely at the corner of the ceiling. “Faulty reasoning. Lack of concentration”. Henry immediately runs him through a checklist of questions, from how Sophie earned this honor to “Name the constituent elements of intimacy”.

Jude answers each question with slow seriousness, though, and it’s the last question that will change his night – “I feel much better now; the waitresses are much prettier than when I entered this establishment, the lighting warmer and less severe” – and, by giving him courage, his entire semester.

Sophie (Mary B. Ward), with an oblong head and a small, boyish build, is not Hollywood’s idea of pretty, but her appeal to Jude makes sense. She is in the bar as well, trying out adjectives on her tolerant roommate Jill as she writes a story about Jude. Her idea of writing is formless and halting, nitpicky and overly precise; she will spend minutes trying to capture her exact meaning with the most careful of reservations. Though she would seek a plot, she retreats into descriptions of the ideas, meandering and obsessive-compulsive. She is intelligent and questing, yet chairbound and careful; she tilts her head at the angle best-calculated to generate the next concept that she might phrase and scribble down. She is easy to parody, yet too unknown for those parodies to be enjoyed by anyone other than the men who write them.

She is someone who would ask Jude “Do you want me tell you something about myself?”, then do so with a speech that begins “I appreciate being taken seriously, yet worry that I am not myself sufficiently serious”. Plus, she is sorta cute. And where Jude approaches his doubts by asking questions, she approaches hers in a pose of confidence, by volunteering tentative answers. As they start to meet in the bookstore where she works, she picks apart all the strategies he uses to avoid ever stating a real belief. Jude’s petulant defensiveness slowly loses its battle against his admiration for anyone whose observations can so totally whup him in an argument.

If I give the idea that Surviving Desire is based in talk, this is true, even – with especial passion – in the bedroom scene. And everyone is willing to pause, if need be, to make sure their thoughts come out as eloquently and articulately as possible. It’s taken as natural, like gangstas copping iambic pentameter in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet (which was awful, but not for that reason) .

In the Theory of Achievement short, which plays with total pretentiousness more openly, a man fighting with his love will stomp into a room, yell “MEANING IS DIFFERENTIAL!”, and stalk away slamming the door. In a tense make-up discussion, the woman will announce “To know that we can die is to be dead already”, starting a dialogue that continues “I know that!” [indignant]; “I _know_ you know that” [calming]; “I told you that in the first place” [childish but accepting the peace].

Hal Hartley is too playful to _rely_ on talk, though. He will intercut scenes like the one where a lonely and confused Jude, in suit and tie, will silently begin dancing at night on the street corner, soon joined in a synchronized routine by two white male extras, also in suits and ties. Or the scene with a young male lover on guitar, serenading the girl in the window above him – only we pan back as he’s joined by a four-piece rock band, while store owners come outside to (again) dance.

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To love Surviving Desire as I do, though, you will need to understand the wedding-vow-like fervor with which two characters – one in the room but unmoving, the other invisible – can intone, over violin, a pledge that begins “The need to make sense of something” (“The need to make sense of something”) … “something you’re not sure of yourself” (“something you’re not sure of yourself”) … “the need to express this sense” (“the need to express this sense”). Richard Linklater made a good indie career out of movies built on the same principle, and I’m very much a fan of his – but I think Hal Hartley (also the man behind Henry Fool and Book of Life) has been a greater writer-director.

>> Compared to the talkfests Slacker or Waking Life, Hartley movies have just as much philosophy while also containing _stories_. Jude and Sophie negotiate a real love affair, Jude struggles with teaching, and the most romantic scenes in the movie come with a pretty homeless woman who asks every passing male stranger “Marry me, sir! Will you take my hand in marriage, to love and to cherish?” … which starts a story, tied to the others, of its own.

Plus, while I loved the obsessive lunacies of the characters in Slacker, Waking Life’s philosophy talks were run-of-the-mill late-night college bull session. Hartley is better-read and smarter than Linklater, so his ideas come from farther afield.

>> Compared to Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, Hartley’s Surviving Desire is more generous. Those movies, especially the latter, were wonderful two-person romances, but reduced the rest of the world to pretty scenery and unwanted spouses. (Granted, I loved the passing actor playing a cow, but Ethan and Julie’s couple didn’t even go see his play.) In Surviving Desire, everyone’s allowed love and thoughts and questions.

Even the bartender – taking the standard psychologist / confessor role – goes from guessing “There’s a pretty girl” to guessing “You’re impressed by her charming combination of unassuming conscientiousness and girlish naivete”. It reminds me of Jasper Fforde’s novel the Eyre Affair, where the girlish receptionist at a John Milton conference can suddenly whisper “I _hate_ Milton; his early stuff is okay, but he disappeared up his own butthole after Charlie got his head lopped off. Goes to show what too much republicanism will do for you”. But I like this even better, for when Jude replies “So what if I am?”, the bartender will get one of the simplest, wisest lines of the film.

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“What is your job?”, a character is asked at one point; “Something I don’t like”. “Why do you do it, then?”, is the follow-up; “I need to pay my rent”, he replies. Some of the worst and falsest things in the world, from the Holocaust and the destruction of the Amazon on down, are done because people like us assumed that’s good enough. Surviving Desire's characters are no smarter than the rest of us, except for this: they insist on a real answer. From this, the stories follow.

Recommended: Yes