The popular theory of the lesbian era involves a romance between two different types of women – a blonde and a brunette, both white.desert heart This style is my favourite. The premise is as slick as its nearly 90-minute runtime. Vivian (Helen Shaver), a buttoned-up English professor at Columbia, relocates to Reno, Nevada, also known as divorce capital of the worldTo survive the six weeks required to get a quick, no-fault divorce. Enter Kay (Patricia Charbonneau), a young, free-spirited (read: lesbian) woman who openly pursues Vivian like a lesbian in 1959. Tumbleweeds roll, nipples touch, and soon Vivian’s world opens up.
Vivian first meets Kay on the road to Reno, in the passenger seat of a car driven by a woman named Frances, who owns an all-inclusive divorce farm, where Vivian spends the next six weeks presumably reading and writing raunchy literature. Intends to. After Francis and Vivian’s sensible car passes Kay, who is driving a shiny convertible in the opposite direction, Kay reverses the convertible to say “hi” and begins to roughly lay her down: “What? May I call you Professor?” She teases, black hair blowing in the wind. When an oncoming car comes up behind her, Kay waits until the last second to shift her car into drive and avoid the accident.
meet-cute sets up Vivian and Kay as a familiar pair of adversaries: the conservative, sexually repressed older woman with all her buttons unbuttoned and the free-wheeling lesbian potter in jorts. To Vivian, Kay symbolizes a breathtaking and completely thoughtless way of life, a way that certainly exists less than a mile from Vivian’s home in New York City, but which Vivian has never experienced before. Have seen, or chosen to ignore. Falling in love is always a risk, but falling for Kay, as far as Vivian sees it, would be to risk everything: her reputation in society and her sense of herself, not to mention her cozy room in the divorce farm. to do. The film underlines this with scenes of Kay’s day job as a change girl at a local casino, where the air is filled with smoke and thick with the sounds of the slots, where the women are sad and the men are sensual.
desert heart It was adapted from Jane Rule’s 1964 book, desert of heartWhich Rule wrote after working in a casino in Reno one summer. The film is simpler and more sentimental than the novel, reducing the age difference from 15 years to a less objectionable decade. (In the novel, the two women resemble each other. And not only are they often mistaken for mother and daughter, Vivian’s character is affected by maternal feelings towards her young lover after coitus.) Rule, a The 6-foot-tall American-born Canadian, wrote desert of heart In 1961 and five years before Canada decriminalized homosexuality, the book was rejected by 22 publishers before it finally appeared in 1964. At the time, Rule’s novel was one of the first to take homosexual desire seriously and provide an optimistic ending, much to the dismay of critics.
Director Donna Deitch first became aware of Rule’s book in 1979, when a friend gave her a copy. She read it seven times in a row and immediately knew she wanted to adapt it for film. Deitch said, “I immediately liked the central idea: a love affair between two women in the context of all the gambling and risk-taking going on in Reno.” an interview In monthly film bulletin Published in August 1986. “It was a book where you were advocating for them to stay together, not waiting for one or the other of them to commit suicide.” Deitch was alluding to other films in the limited lesbian canon of the time, in which lesbian women had exits in one of two ways, either ending up with the male love interest or dying suddenly. Kriti is included children’s time (1961), in which a woman who has fallen in love with another woman hangs herself; fox (1967), in which two women consummate their relationship only for one of them to be crushed by a tree; Or personal best (1982), in which a queer track-and-field star leaves her lesbian lover for a man.
In this context, risk desert heart Are comparatively comfortable. The film is honest about the dangers that pursue queer women in its world – they are harassed by men behind closed doors and abandoned by family – but nothing comes close to harsh fates like death and mandatory heterosexuality. Doesn’t even reach. The number of earthquakes is higher on the west coast, but desert heart‘The promising ending was seismic for its day and age.
In the 1980s, when the AIDS crisis reached its peak and homophobia became everyday, no one wanted to fund Deitch’s faintly gay film. He spent nearly six years raising money to cover the film’s $1.5 million budget, collecting NEA grants and individual donations. She even sold her house to pay for the soundtrack, which featured a dreamy group of Patsy Cline, Kitty Wells and other country singers belting out beat after beat in the film. What’s riskier than selling your house so that Elvis can star for 28 seconds in a brief cutaway scene of one of Vivian’s beloved queer rituals (buying her first button-down)?
I saw it for the first time desert heart in the summer of 2020, and, in unintentional homage to Deitch, I watched the film over and over again that first week. I’m not old enough, physically or sexually, to have grown up in a world where the only representation of homosexuals on screen was murderous, suicidal or dead. (My early canon had its own problems, more than enough. white, being sad all the time homosexuals who existed at any time other than today.) By comparison, the rest of desert heart It felt intoxicating. The acting can be rough around the edges, and the script is sometimes charmingly cheesy. But if you let yourself fall in, as I did, it all comes together in a feverish romance.
Deitch understood that the risk of homosexual desire was enough to make a feature film powerful. start time desert heart Dull and unstructured, offering a fantasy outside of late capitalism in which longing can provide structure to your days. There is nothing else to do in the desert but be present in your body and yield to your desires; The pandemic has proven that ample free time will crack even the most clueless egg. each of desert heartIts hazy haze highlights Vivian. She trades her weird, prim hat for a cowboy hat. She replaces her pencil skirt with pants. She buys his button-down and, after some half-hearted coaxing, eventually has a big, lesbian orgasm.
Critics sometimes outline the climax desert heart As for its sex scene: a breathless, almost unbearably cool montage of perfection after days and days of honky-tonk lust. And of course, the explicit nature of the scene was revolutionary for the day. But for me, the true heart of desert heart It is early in the morning when the women attend the engagement of Kay’s best friend and sometime lover, Silver. A drug addict drives Vivian down the dark path of a desert road to watch the dawn rise over the Pyramid Lake and paint the peonies of the mountains. The two stroll along reflective periwinkle water before getting caught in a rain storm, culminating in a soft, unreserved kiss through the car window. This cathartic moment – after long dusty, dry desert days where everything, plants and animals, are thirsty for water and burning under the sun, where survival seems impossible, let alone indeed let it be living-One of the best moments of catharsis in any romance movie.
At some point in the novel, Kay’s character shares a philosophy with her old lover: “If you don’t play, you can’t lose.” She’s talking gambling, the knowledge that can only come from working in a casino and watching patrons lose everything over and over again. In the film, Deitch modified this line to be more optimistic, and also introduced it in a brief cameo by Slots: “If you don’t play, you can’t win.” in the world of desert heartThis is a big risk: losing one’s reputation is certainly a smaller gamble than walking away from a great love. With these results in mind, the only option is to cross your fingers and play your hand. I think this revision could only have come from Rule portraying the gay world in the future and daring to imagine more for his characters. It’s impossible to know whose adaptation it is desert heart This is what it might have looked like in the 1960s, but it will almost certainly be less promising.
Although desert heart Often called the first lesbian film with a happy ending, it is unclear whether Kay and Vivian will end up together. As Vivian catches the train from Reno, she convinces Kay to join her, if not to New York City, then at least to the next station: “What do you want?” asks in those last moments. Vivian replies, “40 more minutes with you.” But a happy ending doesn’t last forever; Some little lovers never leave the dance floor. Anyone with dyke experience will tell you that the first woman we fall in love with is rarely destined to be, but she will always hold a place in our hearts for being the first woman to open up our world to us. I will never forget how dazzling that moment was for me. I went to a party in her living room. We closed our eyes and started dancing. If you had told me she would break my heart later in the summer (she did) I wouldn’t have even cared. All I could think about was the next forty minutes with her.