Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Desert Hearts
1985 · Donna Deitch · Desert Hearts on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how small Vivian looks against the desert sky. (camera)
Elswit shoots the Nevada desert in wide, horizontal compositions that dwarf the characters, especially Vivian, against the vast open land.
Payoff: The landscape externalizes her dislocation before she says a word about it.
Notice the difference between Vivian's suits and Cay's looser clothes. (setting)
Vivian's tailored gloves and jackets code class and repression, while Cay's more physical wardrobe reads as freedom and ease in her own body.
Payoff: Costume alone tells you which woman is still guarding herself and which one already isn't.
Listen for the country and rock and roll songs on the radio. (sound)
The film has no original score. Period recordings like Patsy Cline's 'Crazy' carry the emotional weight that music usually supplies.
Payoff: The songs anchor the year and mirror the ache at once, doing double duty a composed score would only do once.
Watch Vivian's small physical loosenings around Cay. (performance)
Helen Shaver plays Vivian's control as a shell that cracks gradually, mostly through restraint and tiny shifts in posture rather than speeches.
Payoff: You can track her whole change of heart just by watching what her body allows itself to do.
Once you have seen it
Notice the six-week clock hanging over every scene. (structure)
Vivian is only in Reno for the length of her divorce residency, and the film never lets you forget that the clock is running out.
Payoff: Every scene of growing closeness is also a scene of time running out, which is what gives the romance its urgency.
Watch what happens, and doesn't, on that train platform. (structure)
The ending resolves nothing in the conventional sense. Cay boards the train for only a few stops, and the film simply leaves the future open.
Payoff: Deitch refuses the tragic ending the genre expected of her, and that refusal is the whole point of making this film.
Watch how the ranch and the desert stage every meeting. (staging)
Deitch uses cars, rooms, and open land to physically shrink the distance between the two women scene by scene, before either says what she wants.
Payoff: The space between them closes before the dialogue admits it, so the blocking tells the story first.
Carry this in: Watch the space between the two women shrink scene by scene. The film ends without punishing them for closing it.