{"id":118,"date":"2002-04-30T06:44:50","date_gmt":"2002-04-30T13:44:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/?p=118"},"modified":"2008-06-16T06:46:46","modified_gmt":"2008-06-16T13:46:46","slug":"love-and-punishment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/?p=118","title":{"rendered":"Love and Punishment"},"content":{"rendered":"

Les Cahiers du Cinema, December 1993<\/em>
\nLove and Punishment<\/strong> By Thierry Jousse
\nTranslated by S\ufffdbastien Wailliez<\/p>\n

Hartley’s world is not wide, it is rather narrow and his detractors even call him a mean person. This man from Long Island actually belongs to a very special category of directors: the repetitive ones, the obsessional, the monomaniac, the ones who write from a theme and its variations, the ones who work in quite a small perimeter and rarely venture to get out of it. This is a well-known family: its foregoing great men and patron saints are Hawks and Ozu, its spiritual sons and grand-sons could be Eric Rohmer, Woody Allen, Nanni Moretti and probably Hal Hartley, nowadays. This little foreword is meant to confirm to the amateurs that they won’t be disappointed by “Surviving Desire,” this mid-length film that was made between “Trust” and “Simple Men” for American Playhouse.<\/p>\n

But this charm of familiarity and repetition doesn’t mean you won’t be surprised. You will for instance discover that “Surviving Desire” is set under the sign of Dostoievski, which is particularly paradoxical for a director that was often said to be a minimalist. The beginning of the movie is set in a class-room. The teacher (Martin Donovan) is reading for his pupils a passage from “The Brothers Kamarazov” that ends with this leitmotif: “Active love is a work, a discipline.” And this is also the leitmotif of this rather dramatic comedy. Questions like love and pedagogy are raised. There is also much in it about the contradictions between desire and reality, the stormy relations between knowledge and ignorance, the spasm and lack of communication, books and life, … One can retrieve the aphorism and the theorem-like shapes — under a simple and seducing appearance — that are so typical of Hartley’s movies. This is the reason why this film begins and ends with a blackboard, so that the characters — and particularly men — can make proofs and state principles. As in Godard’s or Moretti’s films (particularly “Bianca”), it is the transmission, which gets out of control, the affirmation of a kind of terrorism and its permanent irony, that create the story and sketch the shape of the movie. It amounts to a kind of slow (and somehow affected) burlesque in this particular film.<\/p>\n

The subject in “Surviving Desire” is the tragicomedy of love and speech. Both gifts and requests are an endless deception and the characters love one another or quarrel because of this permanent misunderstanding. This modest movie (that equals lots of great ones) therefore tells a simple story of obsessional love and libertinage. It sometimes takes the appearance of a modern comedy with the actors giving tit for tat. The relationships between Sophie (Mary Ward), who is the desired woman, and the obscure teacher tend to be ruled by a moral contract, as with other characters in Hartley’s movies. But desire is too strong to be so easily dominated by words, even words from the Bible (that some characters utter to abuse each other). “Surviving Desire” is not only a theoretical movie, it is also a concrete and elegant movie; elegant in gestures and movements. Hartley took the liberty of setting two scenes as musicals. The first one is a silent choreography of amorous joy that ironically recalls “West Side Story.” The second one is an unexpected rock concert in the middle of a street when you can see some young and old country people dancing on a corner of the shot. These two splendid choreographies anticipate the greatest sequence of “Simple Men” when four characters set themselves to dance on a song by Sonic Youth. It is a way to honour Godard’s “Bande \ufffd Part,” but it also reveals the truth about Hartley’s staging which is constantly tending towards choreography. An equilibrium is reached between the artificial and the natural, the recreative and the serious. You can also notice moments when the shapes of faces stand out against the set and even against the bodies they belong to, in order to come towards you and literally take a look at you. Garish color spots breach the landscape but they are toned down by the use of a 16 millimeter camera.<\/p>\n

Besides its particularly subtle accompaniment music, “Surviving Desire” is probably the most sensual movie Hartley has made so far. Throughout the film Mary Ward’s face looks as if it had been shot by loving eyes. The way she appears in slow motion, stares at the man she is in love with, or simply the way she’s standing right in the middle of the book-shop where she works to offer help to the customers are exquisite.<\/p>\n

In this respect, this telefilm that looks modest at first sight — but it’s all false pretences — is as valuable and worthy as Hartley’s greatest ones. I would even say it is his best movie beside “The Unbelievable Truth.” “Surviving Desire” materializes the beginning of full maturity for Hartley, though he preserves his particular charm made of ingenuousness intact. The conclusion of “Surviving Desire” is rather pessimistic and the amazing thing is that this movie stimulates you as a tonic alcohol which gets you slightly ipsy, moves your guts but also makes your brains work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Les Cahiers du Cinema, December 1993 Love and Punishment By Thierry Jousse Translated by S\ufffdbastien Wailliez Hartley’s world is not wide, it is rather narrow and his detractors even call him a mean person. This man from Long Island actually belongs to a very special category of directors: the repetitive ones, the obsessional, the monomaniac, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martindonovan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}