Donna Deitch | Desert Hearts / 1985

kierkegaard’s leap

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nathalie Cooper (screenplay, based on Desert of the Heart by Jane Rule), Donna Deitch (director) Desert Hearts / 1985

 

The seminal lesbian film, Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts begins where the seminal woman’s movie of 1939, George Cukor’s The Women, almost ends, in Reno, on a ranch filled with women waiting out the period of six weeks of Nevada residency which made them legally able to file for a quick divorce. Only the women in Cukor’s film, at least most of them, were not lesbians, but heterosexual bounty hunters, so to speak, in Reno to collect their divorce settlements and in a few cases to round up their husbands and bring them back into the marriage.

      The hero of Desert Hearts, Vivian Bell (Helen Shaver), however, has no such intentions. A well-educated and stylish English professor at Columbia University, Vivian is not seeking any settlement and the divorce has not been occasioned, evidently, by any wrong doing on either side of the marriage. She suddenly has simply realized that her very proper marriage with her equally proper career-driven husband is empty and meaningless, and, although she clearly loves teaching, her life is basically vacuous as well. She wants desperately to move into a new space, try something different, to experience life instead of sleepwalking through it as a career woman. The year is 1959, and most women just didn’t do this sort of thing, but then, as we soon discover, Vivian is different.

      She arrives in Reno, however, as a fraught, nervous, shell of a being, probably never having been in the West, represented by the open, bawdy, shout-outs of the ranch owner Frances Parker (Audra Lindley), a freckle-faced alcoholic, who has been through it all, particularly given she has had a ten-year relationship with a married man, a man she loved so much that she has adopted his daughter when she was rejected by her own mother, the fresh-faced tomboy Cay Rivers (Patricia Charbonneau) and the overly polite and obedient adult boy, Walter (Alex McArthur), the son she treats as a servant, relaying on both of them to keep her psychologically functioning. For if Frances seems indomitable, she is at heart a worn out, frightened being, terrified of the world collapsing around her. As Cay later tells her, she pours her love into people without being able to receive any of it back. Frances’ love is a love of need, not one of open sharing.

      Into this wild and whirling world of rough women, wild horses, rude sexist men, and the psychological vortex surrounding them Vivian steps, in her well-designed Dior suit and heels. It’s not that she is precisely a prude, but Vivian is simply unprepared for the rough and tumble world she is about to encounter, including some of the taunting fellow residents. Clearly, she has been insulated by a world of pretend politeness and meaningless chatter. These women speak their minds—and she soon discovers, their hearts.

       In the 1959 Clay is also openly lesbian, unthinkable for the time. Yet, as some critics have pointed out, director Deitch, despite her rather traditional narrative storytelling, does not at all dwell of the swirl of comment and disapproval that was surely likely to create in the day. The only outspoken commentary against her behavior is spoken by her own surrogate mother, Frances, and that is only a cover for her fears that she might lose her daughter, who works in a gambling casino in Reno but lives in a separate cottage on the ranch. The only other disapproving voice, Darrell (Dean Butler)—who works with Clay at the casino—actually says nothing about Clay’s

lesbianism; he simply ignores it in his attempts to get her into his arms and bed. Clay’s best friend Silver (Andra Akers), about to be married, and whose wedding Clay later attends, seems to have once perhaps even had a sexual encounter with Clay, but is equally accepting.

       As Vito Russo expressed it: “Deitch's refusal to feature the straight world's reaction to lesbianism as the focus of her film made all the difference in the way the relationship between the women was perceived by audiences.”

       Without focusing on the swirl of scandal that surely Clay would have met with in the day, Deitch can focus instead on the real issue, perhaps for the first time in film: what is a lesbian and how is her life different from others?

       In fact, we quickly learn, except for the focus of her love, there is no difference. There are no ropes hanging in the closet waiting for after the confession as in The Children’s Hour. No men around ready to gawk over two women in bed as in so many of the male-driven exploitative lesbian films previous. Clay (as performed by the wonderfully vivacious Charbonneau) is a beautiful, open-minded, healthy, and well-adjusted woman who can take the taunts of the toughest men, and the clucks of any coven of hen-pecking women. She’s tough and tender. A cowgirl who creates pottery.

       And once Vivian lays eyes on her and she on Vivian, despite the 10-year-age difference, the two are hooked, even if the presumably straight Vivian has a long ways to go before she can except her own feelings.

 

     Most of the film, in fact, is centered about the slow boil of Vivian’s emotional involvement with Clay, which begins with a simple request by Frances to put a couple of pieces of mail under her door and ends in one of the most beautiful and realistic lesbian sex scenes outside of Chantal Akerman’s Je tu il elle (I you he she) of 1974 ever put on celluloid. In between, where most the movie lingers, we watch Clay going about her days as Vivian watches, is taught, and finally learns what it is to truly step out of the boundaries she been seeking to escape. Vivian may not have known why she has needed a divorce from her husband, but Cay reveals it to her in no uncertain terms. After the first long kiss, and an even further retraction into rejection of the whole idea, Cay won’t let her go, jumping into her hotel bed, where she’s been forced to retreat by the jealous Frances, refusing to take no for an answer.

      Fortunately, Vivian is bright enough and just adventuresome enough to take Kirkegaard’s leap and get, as Clay has described, the brass ring with another woman. The problem, of course, as in many a romance film, is the time is approaching for her to return to her world as a professor. What to do when you’ve fallen in love?

     In a wonderful variation of the many heterosexual films where the man or woman run after the train (Wilder’s 1957 film Love in the Afternoon is a perfect example) to be pulled in at the very last moment into the departing angel’s arms, Vivian simply convinces Clay to ride with her to the next station by which time she hopes to convince her to join her in New York—although both women know it will be nearly impossible for the horse-back riding cowgirl to adjust to the proper faculty parties of Columbia where surely the whirl of shame will be circling about the room.

      In 2016, Deitch announced plans to produce a sequel to Desert Hearts to be set in New York City during the women’s liberation movement, but apparently and unfortunately, funds evidently couldn’t be raised to bring that to fruition. How wonderful it would have been to find out what happened on that voyage to the next station.

     What we are left with, however, is pretty wonderful: a fresh realist tale that along with others since, such as Todd Hayes’ Carol, focuses honestly on lesbian love. Writing in Slant Clayton Dillard summarized the movie in a manner in which I concur:

     

“Whereas Brokeback Mountain reduced its protagonists’ gay romance to the looming certainty of violence and tragedy in order to garner cheap pathos, Desert Hearts reads between the lines of desire and self-assessment to locate the liminal place where the notion of personal identity begins and ends. That such a process entails convincing the self of its value as much it does convincing others is one of the film’s central arguments. At a casino, an unnamed woman leans over to Vivian, who’s scoping out the slot machines, and says that if one doesn’t play, one doesn’t win. Take that as the mantra of Desert Hearts, which advocates risk and consciousness in tandem as the only means to overcome the cold, repressive hand of so-called normative.”

 

Los Angeles, August 4, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024).