"Gas, Food, Lodging"
                Reviewed by Linda Lopez McAlister
                  On "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM
                        December 5, 1992

    I'll always to out of my way to see a film by a woman about
women, so should be no surprise that last night I drove to the
Movies at Pinellas Park, the only theater in the Bay area showing
"Gas, Food, Lodging,"  a new film by independent filmmaker Allison
Anders who both wrote the screenplay and directed.

    As you can tell from the title, this film is about life in one
of those small towns alongside the highway that you've driven past
in the blink of an eye unless you have to stop for gas, you're
hungry, or you need a motel room.  There's hardly any other reason
for most of us to spend time in an isolated, dilapidated place like
Laramie, in the desert region of southern New Mexico.  So we seldom
get a glimpse of what life is like in such a place.  In "Gas, Food,
Lodging" Allison Anders gives us such a glimpse and (with maybe one
exception) she doesn't romanticize what we see.

    The film focuses on the family of Nora Evans (Brooke Adams), a
forty-ish waitress in a truck-stop restaurant and single mother of
two teenage daughters abandoned years before by their father.  The
story is narrated by the younger daughter Shade (played appealingly
by Fairuza Balk) whose favorite escape from the dullness of the
place and the tension at home between her mother and her "tough"
sister Trudi (Ione Skye) is to spend hours in the Spanish-language
movie theater weeping over the films of Mexican movie queen Elvia
Rivero.  (The scenes from these fictional films that Andershas con-
cocted are actually funny subtle parodies of 1940s style
melodrama).   Shade longs for what she takes to be "normal" family
life, i.e., a family with a father-figure present, so she tries to
find a man her mother might like.  Trudi is looking for men in a
more direct way and has become the town slut whom the local high
school boys are happy to have sex with and then make fun of.  Nora
is trying her best to raise her daughters but can only scream and
yell at Trudi for her troubled and rebellious behavior (the causes
of which remain a mystery to her) and though she doesn't get so
angry at Shade who is an exceptionally sweet kid, it's clear they
have no effective means of communication either.  Nora is trying to
do what she thinks is right for her girls and that includes
sublimating her own sexual desires to set a good example for them.

    Things happen to all three of these women during the film as
men come and go in and out of their lives but I don't want to go
any further in plot summary because I hope you'll see this film for
yourself.  One of the things I especially liked about this film is
its awareness of contrasting cultures and lifestyles.  It's aware
of the racism that Latinos endure in New Mexico from Anglos even
though their ancestors have been there for 400 years.  It's aware
that there are gay teenage boys even in little Southwestern towns.
It's a film that knows the claustrophobia of lives lived almost
entirely in the cramped quarters of single-wide mobile homes.  It's
also very appreciative of the subtle beauty of the desert
landscape. One of the characters is a rock hound who looks for
rocks that glow brilliantly under ultra-violet light and there
is an exceptionally beautiful love-scene shot with a backdrop of
such radiantlly colored stones.  Another beautiful moment comes
when Shade visits to the home of Javier, whom Trudi has insulted by
calling him a "wetback" but whom Shade has come to love.  Javier's
mother, a classic New Mexican beauty, is deaf but she can hear the
vibrations of music in the floor and she and Javier and finally
Shade, as well, join in a joyous celebratory dance.

   It's hard to resist comparing this film to another one with the
same single-mother-and-teenage-daughters theme: Nora Ephron's "This
Is My Life" that came out earlier this year.  Ephron's work was
urban, slick, and funny; this is rural, rugged, and bittersweet.
Both speak truth about raising daughters alone/growing up in a
single-mother household.  And aren't you glad we live in a time
when women can get behind the camera themselves and speak to us
from their own experiences of these things.

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