The Down Side of High Desert Life : Suburbia: Jenny Cool’s documentary shows that the ‘good life’ in Antelope Valley exacts too high a price for some.

Public television viewers nationwide will get an intimate look at the Antelope Valley tonight in a documentary that focuses on the strains that living in a distant bedroom suburb imposed on two women and a teen-age girl.

In “Home Economics,” filmmaker Jenny Cool paints a sharply focused portrait of stressed-out suburbanites, one of them her former sister-in-law, paying a steep price for home ownership, which they eventually decide is too high.

The documentary, which Cool made as part of her master’s thesis at USC’s Center for Visual Anthropology, will be broadcast at 10 p.m. on KCET, Channel 28, as part of the “P.O.V.” series of independent “point of view” films. It will be seen on other public TV stations throughout the nation.

The film pictures a sea of red and gray tile roofs springing up from the dry brown desert, beyond colorful billboards urging motorists to pull off the Antelope Valley Freeway and put a down payment on a dream home. The signs beckon motorists to tracts such as “Spring Ridge,” “Moon Shadows” and “California Traditions.” For as little as $99,990, the billboards boast, you can move into “new homes designed for first-time buyers!”

These neatly designed tracts may look like the suburban dream come true. But after move-in day, Cool found, many Antelope Valley home-buyers must endure long, stressful commutes to work, leaving them little time or energy for their families.

One result, she discovered, is increased child abuse and marital discord. The Antelope Valley has the highest per capita rate of child abuse cases in Los Angeles County.

This hidden cost quickly became apparent to Vicky Ivanov, director of administration for a student writing program at USC.

Early in the film, she tells Cool that she once warned her husband that she would never live in the high desert. Then she got a look at the lavishly furnished, beautifully decorated model houses. “They were so big and pretty,” she tells the filmmaker. “Everything looked so perfect, you know, like a dream.”

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Ivanov moved into one of these dream houses, calling it a reward for her years of hard work. She tells Cool about her excitement over planting her own rosebushes.

But Ivanov’s life in the Antelope Valley did not remain rosy.

Her teen-age daughter, Harmoni Hutton, was stunned by the racial tension at her school. “I’ve never been called ‘honky’ so many times in my life” or heard such widespread use of a derogatory term for African-Americans, she says in the film.

The teen-ager tells Cool that her classmates are disillusioned. “I don’t know anyone who wants to stay here the rest of their life,” she says.

Ivanov herself developed second thoughts. Her new house required upkeep. Neither she nor her husband was around when their daughter came home from school. And after a long commute, her husband was tired and uncommunicative.

“To own a house, that’s a high price,” Ivanov tells the filmmaker. “Too high. I wouldn’t do it again. I wouldn’t move out here again.”

Today, Ivanov is separated from her husband and renting an older, less attractive house in Lawndale, just 10 to 15 minutes from her job.

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In an interview last week, Ivanov said she has mixed emotions about the airing of Cool’s documentary. “It’s kind of embarrassing because it’s private,” she said. “But on the other hand, I’m glad it was done, and I’m glad Jenny’s getting noticed for her work.”

Cool’s look at the Antelope Valley takes a rather unorthodox approach. Although she interviewed some city officials and business leaders, none appears in the finished film. “Home Economics” has no narration and no captions identifying the people or places on screen, except for one opening scene-setter: “Antelope Valley, California 1993.”

The 29-year-old filmmaker shot 21 hours of footage in the high desert, but her final cut consists almost entirely of comments from Ivanov, her daughter and one other woman who was reeling from the recent breakup of her marriage.

“I resisted very heavily getting any other kind of ‘experts’ in there,” Cool said in an interview from San Francisco, where she now works for a firm that looks for methods to use technological advances in education. “It struck me that the real experts were the subjects of the film.”

Despite her narrow focus, Cool was able to touch on key issues that Antelope Valley leaders continue to wrestle with, including child abuse, racial tension and a severe job shortage that forces an estimated 40,000 residents a day to commute elsewhere to work.

Since the documentary was filmed, all three of her subjects have moved out of the Antelope Valley.

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Still, Cool insists that she was not out to defame the high desert towns. Her goal, she says, was to shed light on the suburban stress found in fast-growing communities from coast to coast.

“I’m not pointing a finger at the developers,” said Cool. “It’s not about the Antelope Valley. It’s about a national phenomenon in bedroom communities.”

Cool--whose family shortened the Irish name “McCool”--was reared in India, Pakistan, the Philippines and Hawaii by parents who never owned their homes. After visiting her brother in the Antelope Valley house he bought, she wondered why people would take on the expense and inconvenience of owning a house in a distant suburb.

To find out, Cool began filming interviews with commuters and other residents. The most heartfelt comments, she decided, came from Ivanov, her daughter, Harmoni, and a divorced mother named Kelly Killen. Although she is not identified as such in the film, Killen is the ex-wife of Cool’s brother.

Killen, who had lived in Lancaster for two decades, tells Cool that the exodus of commuter cars along the Antelope Valley Freeway resembles “a huge fluorescent caterpillar in the morning before daylight.”

When the filmmaker asks Killen about the importance of home ownership, she replies: “To the population of Lancaster, it means a place to drive your car into, turn your porch light on, make a meal and wait until it’s time to go to work the next day.”

Today, Killen has remarried and teaches middle school in rural Michigan, where she lives in a 115-year-old farmhouse. “On a personal level, it’s much better,” she said in a phone interview. “I don’t know if other people from the Antelope Valley would find it a favorable lifestyle.”

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Killen said she hopes the film will prompt viewers nationwide to think about how family relationships suffer when people are consumed by the pursuit of high-paying jobs and costly new houses.

Seeing herself in Cool’s film will be painful, Killen said, but added that she thought that, all in all, “It wasn’t an easy film for her to make . . . she was very tender and diplomatic.”