Mermaid in the Desert

A student at a New England boys' school is infatuated with an instructor's wife who has Multiple Sclerosis. The woman struggles to show her strict husband how love, rather than demands, helps the student to blossom, but eventually she falls into a coma. While she is able to have some "looking down" awareness of what is happening, her coma is what brings her husband to an understanding of the needs of others.

A young man with everything to live for is crushed to learn of the death of his fiancée in a fire on Christmas Eve. For three years he wallows in self-pity until a young girl reminds him of the true meaning of Christmas.

With the vivid remembrance of a mysterious brunette still etched on his mind, her lonely secret admirer has a chance encounter with a dead ringer for her and attempts to appease his repressed emotions.

A young woman takes work on a Martha's Vineyard farm and befriends the 10-year-old farmer's daughter only to discover present-day horrors that stem from a dark past.

In addition to declaring that Katharine's (Lynn Redgrave) head and heart line are hopelessly fused into one "simian line", eccentric palm reader/fortune-teller Arnita (Tyne Daly) makes a dire prediction: By the end of the year, one of the couples present at a Halloween party will have broken up. But will it be Katharine and her much-younger boyfriend Rick (Harry Connick Jr.); her upstairs tenants Marta and Billy or new yuppie neighbors Sandra (Cindy Crawford) and Paul? Fueled by Arnita's prediction, each of the couples begins to drift apart in a sea of doubt and distrust. Can the "divine" intervention of two well-meaning ghosts (William Hurt and Samantha Mathis) keep these earthly conflicts from erupting into multiple self-fulfilling prophecies?

A stirring and stunning story of an aristocratic family who is unexpectedly swept into the ravages of World War I and a forbidden passion that may be the family's only hope.