#902: DEITCH: Donna: Desert Hearts (1985)

DEITCH, Donna (United States)
Desert Hearts [1985]
Spine #902
Blu-ray

Donna Deitch's swooning and sensual first narrative feature, Desert Hearts, was groundbreaking upon its release in 1985: a love story about two women, made entirely independently, on a shoestring budget, by a woman. In this 1959-set film, adapted from a beloved novel by Jane Rule, straitlaced East Coast professor Vivian Bell (Helen Shaver) arrives in Reno to file for divorce but winds up catching the eye of someone new, the free-spirited young Cay (Patricia Charbonneau), touching off a slow seduction that unfolds against a breathtaking desert landscape. With undeniable chemistry between its two leads, an evocative jukebox soundtrack, and vivid cinematography by Robert Elswit, Desert Hearts beautifully exudes a sense of tender yearning and emotional candor.

92 minutes

Color
Monaural
1:85:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2017

Director/Writers

Adapted from the novel Desert of the Heart by Jane Rule.

Screenplay by Natalie Cooper.

Donna Deitch was 40 when she directed Desert Hearts.

The Film

Let’s start with the positives:

• Deitch spent 25% of her $1M budget on the music. Admirable.
• The scenery outside Reno is spectacular and DP Robert Elswit captured it beautifully.
• The appearance of an LGBT film in 1985 was unusual — this one definitely set the bar for future efforts.
• Vivian Bell (Helen Shaver), Cay Rivvers (Patricia Charbonneau) and Frances Parker (Audra Lindley) all give fine performances.

And the not-so positive:

• Deitch adapted the book, but apparently was dissatisfied with her own work because she hired Natalie Cooper to re-write the screenplay.
• The relationships and motivations of the main characters seem weak and unformed, particularly the ill-defined tension between Bell and Parker.

Film Rating (0-60):

51

The Extras

The Booklet

Twelve-page wraparound featuring an essay by critic B. Ruby Rich.

“What is it about a lesbian love story that fits so snugly into the past and so uneasily into the present? For decades, it not centuries, there has been an imaginary past where lesbians were free to live and love. With history itself a place of half-intuited customs and longed-for possibilities, the setting of a period piece has a way of illuminating the unseen and recalling to memory the forgotten; it opens history up to those written out of it the first time around, and nowhere more powerfully than on the movie screen. Just so in Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts, in which a dude ranch in 1950s Reno, Nevada, is transformed into a magical space where anything is possible, even the kind of lesbian happily-ever-after ending never seen before in a movie theater.”

Commentary

From 2007 featuring director Deitch.

Conversation

Between Deitch and actor Lynch.

Interviews

With actors Shaver and Charbonneau.

Remembering Reno

A program featuring Deitch, DP Robert Elswit, and production designer Jeannine Oppewall.

Excerpt

From Fiction and Other Truths: A Film About Jane Rule, a 1994 documentary about the author of Desert of the Heart, the 1964 novel on which the film is based.

Extras Rating (0-40):

34

51 + 34 =

85

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