Desert Hearts (1985)

image courtesy of indiewire.com

Those reading glasses are doing some heavy lifting. That’s maybe the most honest way I can summarize this film - a film doing a lot of quiet, careful work, but one that also left me expecting something a little more, for lack of a better word, charged. I’ll admit my assumptions going in were off. A lesbian romance made in 1985, at the height of Reagan’s America, directed by a woman - I figured it would feel transgressive, raw, maybe even a little dangerous. What I found instead was something surprisingly conventional in its construction, almost mannered. The screenplay has an odd, stately quality to it - characters speak in ways that feel slightly heightened, not quite naturalistic, with a rhythm that occasionally tips into the theatrical. At moments, it’s as if someone ran a Tennessee Williams script through a slightly cooler, more clinical filter. The editing compounds this. Scenes cut away mid-conversation, dropping you into what feels like a separate isolated moment before you’ve fully left the last one. It creates a fractured, elliptical quality that I found more disorienting than dreamlike. There are stretches of the film that veer into genuinely strange territory - not in a provocative sense, more in a quietly off-kilter, borderline Lynchian sense that I suspect was unintentional. What the film does handle well, and more subtly than I expected, is the texture of Cay’s everyday life. Patricia Charbonneau brings an easiness to the role that masks the quiet friction she navigates - the sideways glances, the unspoken disapproval. The film doesn’t go for melodrama here, and that restraint is to its credit. She isn’t blackballed or destroyed by her community. Life simply continues around her, complicated and imperfect, which feels closer to truth. The romance between Vivian (Helen Shaver) and Cay, however, is slow to ignite. The chemistry that does eventually surface - most forcefully in their first sexual encounter - makes you wish it had been built with more tension throughout. There’s warmth there, but for much of the runtime it stays at a low simmer rather than a boil.

3 out of 5 Stars