"Waiting to Exhale"
                          A film review by
                       Linda Lopez McAlister
                       on "The Women's Show"
                     WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL
                      December 232, 1995

   A few years ago, when I reviewed a film about friendship between two
white women--one of the many on this topic that have appeared in recent
years--an African American friend of mine expressed her frustration that
you never saw a Hollywood film that reflected Black women's experiences
of friendship. She seems to have been expressing a desire shared by a
whole lot of Black women, if the opening day of "Waiting to Exhale" in
Philly was any indication. Every single scheduled screening of the film
for the day was sold out by 1:30 in the afternoon, almost exclusively to
African American women, and I was turned away at the box office. I only
got in to see it because as I was walking away one woman's husband
balked and refused to go in, so I bought his ticket from her. It probably
would have been good for him to see this film, but I was glad, under the
circumstances, that he didn't want to.

   This film, adapted from her novel of the same name by Terry McMillan
and directed by Forrest Whittaker (whom you'll remember as the soldier in
"The Crying Game"),is certainly a womanist film--though such words as
womanist or feminist are never uttered. It's the story of what takes
place in the lives for four Black women living in Phoenix during the space
of one year, from New Year's Eve to New Year's Eve. On the first New
Year's Eve, each of their lives and hopes and dreams is focused either on a
particular man or on their attempts to locate the right man, or on the
psychological devastation that one man wreaks when he chooses New
Year's Eve to declare he's leaving his wife for his mistress (a white
woman). What we see in the film is a process that all four go through
during the year of helping one another to realize that letting a man--
whether husband, lover, sought-after lover, or son--control your life is a
dead end that leads to pain, lack of self-confidence, and destructive anger.
By the end of the year, whether she has a relationship with another man or
not, each one is in a better place in terms of her self-respect and her
appreciation of the role that friends--loving, supportive, candid, women
friends--play in their lives. The women are of very different backgrounds
and socio-economic classes. Bernadine (the pride of St. Petersburg,
Angela Bassett) is the wife of a millionaire business executive with a
gorgeous home in Scottsdale; Savannah (Whitney Houston) is a single
fledgling t.v. producer; Robin (Lela Rochon) is a single , lower-level
management person of some sort; and Gloria (Loretta Devine) is a divorced
mother of a teenage boy and the owner of a beauty shop that both
Bernadine and Robin go to and Bernardine's friend Savannah starts going to
when she moves to Phoenix from Denver where she failed to find Mr. Right.

   The film is very funny and very pointedly from the women's points of
view. The studio's ad campaign is geared toward getting men to
accompany their women to the film and it surely couldn't do any harm
because what they will hear is a lot of candid things that these women
say to each other only in the company of other Black women and a lot of
truths about what they want and don't want from a man. It should be an
eye-opener for a lot of husbands and boyfriends. The women in the
audience I saw it with were quite vocal and appreciative of what the
women on the screen had to say. You could tell these were heartfelt
cheers and/or groans of recognition.

   By far the best acting in the film is that done by Angela Bassett and (in
an uncredited appearance) Wesley Snipes who portrays one version of the
kind of man a woman might truly be able to have a good partnership with.
A working-class version of such a man-- sensitive, caring, honest--is
played with nice simplicity by Gregory Hines.

   The one thing that troubled me about this film was its tinge of
homophobia. All of the women were as heterosexual as they could be but
there were two gay male characters, one a dreadfully stereotyped swishy
hairdresser and the other Gloria's first husband who comes off very badly
as a gay man who comes to see his son and disappears for good when the
son doesn't go to his hotel to see him. This is followed up by a scene in
which the son expresses his pain and disgust at the news that his
father's gay--and that's where the matter is left: it's really a pretty
awful thing.

  Still, with that reservation, I enjoyed "Waiting to Exhale" and it won't
need my recommendation to do just splendidly at the box office; go early
or it may be sold out.

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

<Linda Lopez McAlister is professor of women's studies and philosophy at
the University of South Florida.>

Copyright 1995. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint or reproduce
this review without the permission of the author:

<hypatia@cfrvm.cfr.usf.edu>.



Linda Lopez McAlister Department of Women's Studies HMS 413 University of
South Florida Tampa, FL 33620 (813) 974-0982