To keep his movie from roaming as freely as the heart mentioned in the title, director George Paul Csicsery organizes it around a specific event: the second annual Romantic Book Lovers' Conference, held in New York in 1983. The main character (a term that suits her well) is Chelley Kitzmiller, a Southern California homemaker who read Sweet Savage Love, by Rosemary Rogers, and became instantly addicted to romance novels. It was a life-changing experience for her-and for her family, since she cut down on housework to grab more reading hours, thus loading more chores into the hitherto idle hands of her husband and teenage daughter.
Household tensions escalated more when Kitzmiller set her heart on roaming to the New York conference. The big question was how she'd get there, given her fear of flying. In a clever move, she chartered an Amtrak Superliner, dubbed it The Love Train, and invited like-minded fans to hop aboard for a cross-country trip full of fun, female bonding, and insider chit-chat. Csicsery's film chronicles the journey and the conference, with frequent cutaways to folks back home (including Kitzmiller's busy husband and daughter) and interviews with romance writers.
Among the authors is the genre's then-reigning matriarch, Barbara Cartland, whose appearances are worth the price of the DVD by themselves. She was in her mid-80s when the movie was made, but she doesn't look a day over 110, thanks to the layers of makeup conspicuously coating her face. Reviewing the film's 1987 theatrical release, New York Times critic Vincent Canby described her as an "eye-blinding" kewpie doll attired in "pale blue tulle, feathers of a color no bird ever grew and more jewelry than is absolutely necessary except for one's own coronation." Cartland might have been pleased with that portrayal, especially the coronation part. By that time she'd sold more than 350 million copies of 362 novels, making her "the best-selling author in the world according to the Guinness Book of World Records," as she informs us. This definitely gave her royal status in the $300-million-a-year industry that romance publishing had become, thanks in part to her astonishing success.
Where the Heart Roams includes few figures who aren't romance writers, editors, publishers, fans, or family members. An exception is Playgirl reporter E. Jean Carroll, who rode The Love Train as a journalist but seems to enjoy the romance-novel scene for its own sake, cheerfully joining the gossip-and-giggle sessions and making her own ditzy comments on hot topics like the sort of man a woman really wants. She injects a refreshingly real note into a movie dominated by wishful daydreams, magical thinking, and quixotic castles in the sky.
Even though he made the movie, Csicsery's attitudes toward the romance-novel world--especially the fans, who seek pleasure rather than money--are never made clear. Is he documenting a phenomenon he enjoys and approves of? Or exploiting a tribe of unsophisticated women who don't realize how naïve and silly they seem to outsiders? It's hard to say. The film's blurry point of view can be considered a failing, but looked at with a positive spin, it allows leeway for individual spectators to have very different interpretations, and even opposite ones.
Sliced one way, Where the Heart Roams is a joy-filled tribute to a source of genuine delight for millions of readers, most of them women who've found few other playgrounds so hospitable to their dreams, reveries, and fantasies. Unlike media entertainments that challenge their worldviews and mindsets, romance novels support their generally conservative tacks on sexual behavior and gender roles. Reading these books, talking about them, and aspiring to write them are clean, wholesome pastimes at least as valid as, say, rock concerts or video games. What's wrong with manly men, tender virgins, sacrosanct marriages, and saving yourself for the wedding night?
Sliced the other way, Where the Heart Roams is a freak show populated by self-deluded losers. The fans are so romantic about romance that their grasp on the real, tangible world has grown perilously weak. Their fairy godmother, a bizarrely costumed crone, is so afraid of sex that more than a whisper of it on the last page amounts to "soft porn, which is really a mistake." The books they adore are so repetitive, formulaic, and narrow minded that imaginations aren't invited to flower but left to wither on the vine. It's a brave new world in which the good, the bad, and the ugly are elbowed out by the tepid, the tedious, and the bland.
Since this is a 1987 movie about 1983 events, and the romance-fiction landscape shifts and evolves like any other-if slowly and grudgingly-it's likely that both of these perspectives are outdated by now. Romance novels in North America alone earned $1.63 billion in 2002, and competition has led some publishers to experiment with erotic elements, same-sex pairings, and other ingredients that were too controversial for comfort not long ago. Where the Heart Roams gives a vivid snapshot of the scene, but like a romance novel one reader describes, it "takes you up to a certain point, without going all the way."
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by Mikita Brottman and David Sterritt
