Vivian is a literature professor from New York who has come to Reno to sort a few things out. It’s the 1950s. Her marriage, though amicable, has faded away on her. She yearns for something more, though she’s not sure what. It’s how she finds herself on a ranch, where she crosses paths with Cay, a woman 10 years younger than her who works at a casino and is not afraid to be who she is — defiant, unapologetic, walking the tightrope of living how she wants, and sleeping with who she wants, without getting into too much social trouble. There’s a connection between the two women, undeniably. But what does it mean for both of them, from such different worlds that neither wants to leave?
That’s the central conflict — and romance — in Desert Hearts, a classic of queer cinema from 1985, directed by Donna Deitch, that was the first installment in Best Video’s latest film series, “A Woman’s Work.” Curated by Raizine Bruton and Jules Larson, the screening and talkback series is made possible through a grant from the CT Humanities organization, an independent, non-profit affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Desert Hearts screened on Tuesday evening. Next Tuesday, Sept. 13, will feature the Iranian vampire movie A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, followed by Terminal Island on Sept. 20 and Time on Sept. 27. The series marks the second curation collaboration between Bruton and Larson, who rolled out the feminist filmmaking series “Portrait of a Camera on Fire” at Best Video in March.
Larson.
Before the screening, Larson explained that movie was adapted from the 1964 novel Desert of the Heart, by Jane Rule. When Rule (who is Canadian) wrote the book, in 1961, it was still illegal to be homosexual. “During the time she was trying to publish it, she was rejected 22 times, and finally she got a publisher in the UK to pick it up, and from there the rest is history,” Larson said. The book caught on slowly, but eventually reached the hands of Donna Deitch, who immediately wanted to make a movie of it.
In a parallel act of persistence, Deitch raised funds for years to make the film, traveling the country and throwing parties, and eventually raised $1.5 million. “Basically, it’s one of the gayest movies ever made, because it is literally created by all queer people for funding,” Larson said. Rule said she wanted Deitch to treat the book as raw material. Screenwriter Natalie Cooper “made history by writing the sex scene into the story.”
Today, Larson pointed out, there are more films depicting lesbian relationships, from Carol to Portrait of a Lady on Fire. But in 1985, “this was the lesbian movie. There was no other.” When lesbians appeared in other movies, “they would have the same common fate, or they would fall into some tropes where merely touching another person would be suggestive.” Cooper wanted to go further by depicting a sex scene. Deitch, in turn, wanted to contextualize it, showing women hugging or touching each other in platonic relationships — between friends, between a mother and daughter — “showing all the ways women interact with each other,” Larson said.
Finally, tying it to the title of the film series, Larson encouraged the assembled audience to pay attention to “how labor is involved in all of this.” The setting of Reno is “dominated by gambling, and is pretty much addicted to itself,” but it is “surrounded by a vast, unchanging desert. So how do you change a society that is that unchanging, and addicted to its own town and the way in which it operates. How do you adapt to that?” Larson said. Both Rule and Deitch intended that context to reflect the difficulties in the women’s relationship. “I think this is a terrific love story with hundreds of quotables in it, but it is also a story of realization — knowing when to adapt for a person you love, to help them, and knowing when it’s actually the world that has to adapt,” Larson said.
Larson’s introduction was good preparation for a film that has aged marvelously. Its depiction of the relationship between the two women is blissfully free of the blunt tragedies mainstream movies usually visit upon same-sex couples. The specific social setting in which Vivian and Cay, the two protagonists, find themselves — with surrounding characters in subtly shaded degrees of acceptance and difficulty — allows the movie to dive straight into the nuances of their relationship, as both characters wrestle with who they are, not simply as lesbians, but as women operating in a complicated world, and women who find themselves reaching across a class divide between them to connect with one another. In many ways it’s as anomalous and distinctive now as it was in 1985. It received mixed reviews when it was released, and in a few key ways, we, as a society, are still catching up.
Bruton.
All of this meant that the audience had a lot to talk about with Bruton and Larson in the discussion that followed the screening. Bruton began by discussing the differences between the book and the movie — the way the book was able to give more insight into the story’s secondary characters that were more sidelined (by necessity) in the movie. This led Larson to discuss a particular scene she found moving, in which Cay shares a platonic bath with Silver, a former lover, and her soon-to-be husband, Joe, is perfectly, casually accepting of it. He isn’t threatened; he loves his fiancee for who she is. “It’s like the world has adapted to their relationship,” Larson said, “and it makes you start seeing the way in which it would happen.”
But even as it offers glimpses of a possible future of acceptance, the movie also gave one audience member the sense that the relationship between the two women is “totally doomed,” she said. The distance from Reno to New York is too great, as is the distance between Cay’s working-class world and Vivian’s upper-crust life. And there was the sense of non-acceptance even in New York in the 1950s. Bruton agreed; while Vivian and Cay may be “together at that moment, two months later, there is no guarantee.”
The ambiguity allows for a thorough exploration of Vivian’s layers of realizations and transformations. “The thing I love about her is that she has five different layers of dynamics in not just lesbian culture, but queer culture. You don’t know if you’re a tourist. You don’t know if you’re questioning. You don’t know if you love this person more than they love you.” And in Desert Hearts, “all those things are getting mashed into a hotel room,” and Vivian’s potential partner is “really forward.” For Larson, “that is the moment she realized she’s not a tourist, and she has to make a decision, and she was not quite ready.” In the bedroom scene that follows, the interplay between the two women marks a real turn, in how Vivian perceives Cay and herself. “It’s a great wordless moment,” Larson said, in which “she lets go, and chooses.”
Larson explained that in shooting the love scene, the room was empty except for the two actors, the cinematographer, and the grip. “It allowed them to be more comfortable,” she said. “It took two takes, and they figured it out in the second take.” Larson also explained that the actors — who are heterosexual — took huge risks to their careers in portraying Vivian and Cay. “It was a scary time for them because their lives were going directly into marriage and kids” while portraying a “highly intimate lesbian performance that had nuance, and I think the nuance scared people more than the actual doing of the thing,” Larson said. In the context of the politics of today, she said, “I don’t have a full stake on ‘if you’re not gay then you can’t play the character.’ I think it really has to do with what you’re ready to do, and what you’re ready to be courageous about, and how you’re ready to respond.”
Bruton returned to the theme of labor. “We like to show women working,” she said. “We like to show that women have to work, a lot. That’s not always discussed and it’s not always thought of.” In the context of the 1950s, when the movie takes place, “we usually think of women as homemakers, at home.” But the characters in Desert Hearts “are in the casino the whole time, working, and even when they go away, they have to get right back to it. For me it’s important to show that, to show women hard at work.… They’re out there grinding, just like everyone else.” Paying attention to the work women do also helps the viewer understand better what divides Vivian and Cay even as they’re drawn together.
In the end, though, Desert Hearts, Bruton and Larson said, was an important movie to both of them. Bruton had grown up with Desert Hearts and Larson found it later, when it resonated deeply with her. Larson got the sense of Deitch as knowing “that this was her last chance as a director, and she just gunned it” — and made a classic.
