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Jill Godmllow and "Waiting for the Moon"
Woman is a woman is a woman
BY
E L E A N O R
M A L I N
I
£ £ "W" just want people to like my
movie,” says Jill Godmilow,
director of Waiting for the Moon,
now playing at the 5th Avenue Cinema. ‘‘I
don’t want to be remembered in a lineup of
directors at a Women’s film series; I want
to be thought of as a good film director.”
She observes that everyone wants to know
what John Huston is working on now — no
one asks about Susan Seidelman.
My first reaction to Godmilow’s film
about Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein
was one of bewilderment. The situations
are made up out of whole cloth. Godmilow
has Stein and Toklas in their 40s, when
they were actually much older during that
time period. She has them motoring to a
picnic with Fernande, Picasso’s mistress,
decades after they had separated. Another
picnicgoer was Guillaume Apollinaire, a
French poet, who by then had been dead of
war wounds for many years. Later, Apol­
linaire supposedly dies of mushroom
poisoning, leaving his pretty country girl
mistress and her newborn son — bom
totally of creative imagining. In the film,
Toklas and Stein decide to keep baby Willi
and raise him themselves.
At first I tried to assign symbolic values
to some of the goings-on, and the baby
seemed a prime suspect for a symbol of the
fruits of their friendship, as translated
through their relationships with the artists
of the time — basically everybody who
was anybody, their lovers and friends.
Upon reflection, however, it seems that
what is required is that nothing is required.
Surrender is the key word here. The baby
can be a symbol or not, depending on your
mood or relative grasp of, or lack of,
security.
1 told Godmilow I had wracked my brain
to try and think of another film about
famous people that had used such license,
and had been unable to think of even one.
She immediately named Amadeus, which
went every which way, and also made no
pretense of being accurate, or caring about
it. I had disliked the film for that. I didn’t
know any of the details of Mozart’s life,
and was made to feel insecure watching
the proceedings. Still in all, as Godmilow
says, “ Once you have cast a part, you have
made a statement about the material,” and
that’s true. Those western “ heroes” surely
couldn’t have been so ruggedly handsome,
or so heroic. Bonnie and Clyde were not
anything like Warren Beatty and Faye
Dunaway.
Actually, in her casting and her fanciful
handling of details, Godmilow has arrived
at a product which rings true. She chose to
emphasize the relationship of the two wo-
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Jill Godmilow.
men. There is a lot of conflict, most of
which revolves around an illness Stein
supposedly has, which could be fatal. She
doesn’t tell Toklas, who feels betrayed by
the lack of communication. There ensues
something like a life-and-death struggle
over the direction of the relationship. Who
owes who, and what does she owe her?
And there is not one iota of sex shown
here, a matter which may seem like ab­
negating directorial responsibility by some
younger filmgoers. Godmilow says she
left out the sex because it would be exploi­
tation, too easy. That answer seems legiti­
mate enough to me. As it stands, the po­
tential audience will not be diminished by
the depiction of sex scenes which might
make older or more conservative viewers
uncomfortable. If this seems unfair to you
readers, it is, but that’s the way it really is.
Toklas and Stein are two of the most
famous celebrity figures from this century,
and Godmilow has done us a favor by
recreating something from (or like) a por­
tion of their lives. She wanted to make a
movie about them, she used what she
wanted to use, and though she approaches
the project from a seemingly self-indulgent
point of view, it does hold up, just not by
any pre-ordained standard. It’s a whole
new ball game, and might give one pause
to question the crushingly pre-ordained
standard.
Godmilow says her film was called, “ a
most feminine film,” by a woman
reviewer. I had mentioned the word
“ womanly” and “ reposeful.” She thought
“ reposeful” was accurate.
Much of the merit in this project is en­
hanced by the careful casting. Godmilow
says she scoured the country for 6 months,
looking for someone who could play Stein.
She finally settled on Linda Hunt, as
probably the only actress in America who
could play the part. Academy-award win­
ner Hunt (for Best Supporting Actress for
the part of the Indonesian dwarf male,
Billy Kwan in The Year o f Living Danger­
ously), however, had designs on the
Toklas part, and asked for that; it’s a big­
ger and better part, with more difficult
material. Hunt suggested Linda Bassett,
an English stage actress with whom she
had worked (in Aunt Dan and Lemon,
w ritten for Hunt by Wallace Shawn of My
Dinner With Andre) for the Stein part.
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Bassett fills the role nicely, her close-
cropped haircut being enough to convinc­
ingly suggest the persona of Stein. She
handles the lines with a passivity, or
“ waitingness” that seems to me somehow
feminine, and somehow exactly as I have
thought Stein would be.
Bruce McGill, who played D-Day in
Animal House, and who has done a lot of
TV (a recurring role this season in
MacGwer) , a good part last season in
Magnum. P I ), does a pretty good
Ernest Hemingway. A solid and under­
utilized character actor, McGill is good
every time out, and he was really tickled to
finally get a long speech in a movie, (and
he makes the most of it).
Godmilow started making films in the
’60s. She had a Latino boyfriend, a
painter and high school dropout (not
mutually exclusive). They went to see a lot
of movies, during the time when America
was being bombarded with foreign films.
Her boyfriend suggested they make a film,
“ Uneducated people are like that, they
think you can just do it,” she says. They
borrowed $ 1000 from a Physics professor
of hers, who thought she was special, and
$ 1000 from his mother, who was a bookie,
and shot their film, making every cinematic
error known to man. I suggested she got
off cheap, having learned all she needed to
know for $2000 bucks (see how far that
would get you in a college film class today).
Having the film now all in a box, ready
for editing, Godmilow knocked on many
doors in New York, finally landing a job
editing commercials. She became well-
known for her editing, and over the years
was able to do editing to support herself
while she worked on her own projects. She
directed The Vigil, with Chiquita and
Andre Gregory (the Andre of My Dinner
with Andre), about the Polish theatre
group “ Teatr Laboratorium.” That’s the
famous group Gregory discusses in My
Dinner with Andre, for all you trivia buffs,
and the tack taken by Godmilow was
influenced by their work, where it’s not so
much what really happened, or what’s right
or wrong, but what works and what doesn’t.
Waiting for the Moon has a foreign film
quality about it. It’s pretty; it’s gentle. I
think it renders Toklas and Stein in a way
that they would appreciate. I had a good
time at this movie, though it was so
feminine and so different from films I have
seen to date, that it threw me for a while. In
retrospect, it seems that cinematic offer­
ings on all subjects, even on women, fam­
ous or fictional, have been so relentlessly
white, male and heterosexual, that there’s
no niche at all for this sort of work.
Can the audience appreciate and warm
up to a film about two famous lesbians,
though there’s no sex, and not much foun­
dation in fact? Reviewers have been
hedging, leaving it up to the audience
(which it always is, anyway). It’s possible
the same set of people who have been
complaining about the sex-and-violence
formula will still not like this legitimately
different approach. Possibly because they
are so used to the very formula they decry,
they might miss familiar elements. If wo­
men spend a lot of time complaining men
get all the goodies, and no one considers
the efforts of women, then they should at
least consider this movie. Stuff happens,
calmly, but it happens. The acting is good,
the story holds together. There’s a charm;
it’s reposeful, but there’s charm. And I left
the film wanting to read some Gertrude
Stein.
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