@ Surviving desire is about a brilliant but absent-minded professor of literature, Jude, and his obsession with a passage from The Brothers Karamazov. The professor suspects himself of being an atheist facing a crisis of conscience. He feels attracted to the ethical student Sophie, which doesn’t make things any easier. Sophie, a novice writer, is fascinated by the feelings of her teacher and eventually falls under his spell.In Surviving Desire Hartley also tells a story of love and deception, with characters who are exclusively fluent and intelligent, but that doesn’t bring them any closer to real happiness. As Jude writes on the blackboard at the end f the film during a college about Dostoevsky: ‘Knowing is not enough’. The viewer doesn’t have to be afraid of too much stuffy depth and chatter; there is even a sequence in the film when three men perform a musical-like dance.
In this recently-completed nine-minute film, bodies are thrown around, hands are shaken and breakfast is consumed — all in the name of ambition. Everything revolves…
‘Young, middle-class, white, college-educated, unskilled, broke.’ These are the words which the people paying the lead in this short film use to characterise themselves. They…
