Waiting for the Moon
                Reviewed by Linda Lopez McAlister
            For The Women's Show, WMNF-FM, Tampa, FL

   This Valentine's Day, I thought I'd bring you a romantic treat
in the form of a film about one of the most famous couples of the
20th C.-- Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.  The film is called
"Waiting for the Moon," and watching it again the other night was
comparable to getting a heart-shaped box of truffles.

    I first saw this film shortly after its release in 1987, and
while I liked it, I wasn't wildly enthusiastic about it.  In
coming back to it for a second look, I found it an utter delight.
Was I just in a better mood, easier to please than the first time
around?  Maybe, but I think there's another explanation.

    The first time I saw this film I found it somewhat confusing.
It has an extremely convoluted plot structure starting with a
voice over narration during the credits that alludes back to a
particular sunny day in the garden where we find ourselves in the
first sequence, and which serves as a temporal base point to
which the film keeps circling back intermittently throughout a
series of vignette-like flashbacks that lead us to the final
scene which takes place on an evening earlier in the same summer
as the sunny day in the garden.  I also remember being confused
the first time around as to who was who.  The film is supposed to
be about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, famous childless
lesbian couple, and the first shot shows a woman with an infant
asleep in her arms.  It took me a while to figure out that that
was Gertrude Stein, and then I was distracted trying to figure
out where that baby came from and whose it was.  The first time
through I think I just found this and some of the other unusual
choices made by screenwriter Mark Magill and director Jill
Godmilow to be too distracting to really get into the film.  The
second time through, these were no longer distractions, but
rather complexities that added to my enjoyment of the film.

      Several years ago in New York I saw a musical theater piece
by Al Carmines based on Gertrude Stein's writings called "In
Circles" and it captured wonderfully Stein's own repetitious,
witty, stylized and, well, circular writing style.  This time it
occurred to me that Godmilow and Magill have done something
similar with this film.  It's filled with circles, starting with
the long lazy circular movements of the camera in the scenes in
the garden in summer, and those circles in the plot that keep
bringing us back to the starting point in the garden and then
twirling off again to another place in memory.

     There are many more twists to this plot than there is actual
story being told.  Basically the story is about a difficult
period in their relationship in the late 1930s when Gertrude
Stein had a serious illness which she did not tell Alice about
and Alice is hurt, frightened and furious, and how they
eventually resolve the problem and get back to a warm and happy
place in their relationship.  Through it there are wonderful
conversations and interactions with their friends Appolinaire,
Hemingway, Fernande Olivier (Picasso's lover) and an unlikely but
very funny encounter with a priest in a confessional.  The
filmmakers are inventive at finding ways to incorporate snatches
of Stein's writings into the film, and the whole thing is done
with a tone of lightness and wit that still leaves room for
genuine emotions.  Linda Hunt and Linda Bassett as Toklas and
Stein both give bravura performances and left me feeling as
though I knew Gertrude and Alice.  Who knows if that's what they
were really like, but it's surely what I hope they were like.
Give yourself a little belated Valentine bon-bon and rent this
film at your video store or at Briget Books and see it twice, if
you're like me you'll enjoy it much more the second time.

        For the WMNF Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister
on Women and Film.