If Allison Anders’ screen work had been as interesting as her provocative (and talkative) offscreen persona, she would have become the most prominent contemporary female director. Unfortunately, it is not.
With all the attention surrounding her career and a McArthur Foundation Genius Award, Anders remains an uneven filmmaker, with only one truly satisfying film to her credit, her solo debut, Gas Food Lodging, which won the NY film Critics Award fir Best First Feature.
Anders’ subsequent work, however flawed, has remained personal.
Her first, co-directed feature, Border Radio (1988), about the punk scene in L.A., was done while she “partied and smoked and listened to Fairport Convention with a bunch of guys.” Displaying grit, vitality, and honesty, Gas Food Lodging (1992), the story of a single mother bringing up two teenage daughters in a dusty New Mexico town, drew on Anders’ experience as a single mom. For Mi Vida Loca (1993), she looked no further than her Echo Park neighborhood and its Hispanic girl gangs.
Adapted from Richard Peck’s novel, “Don’t Look and It Won’t Hurt,” Gas Food Lodging is the story of Nora (Brooke Adams), a working-class mom who lives in a trailer with her two daughters. Trudi (Ione Skye) seems to be a tough, foul-mouthed tramp, but she’s essentially a victimized girl. Shade (Fairuza Balk), her younger sister, who spends her time watching Mexican melodramas in a local moviehouse, dreams of reuniting her mother with the father she has never met.
The film cuts deep into the dreary lives and perpetual anxieties of single women, but, for all the bleakness, they are not devoid of humor or awareness that their existence could be better. With a tight focus on the women’s relations with one another, the film depicts thankless jobs, trailer homes–and yearning for something to happen. “I don’t think anyone rescues anyone else in this film,” Anders said, “The men change nothing for these women.”
Perceiving the movie as less about sex or love than about the search for intimacy, Anders claimed that she “could have easily made this intimacy come from women.” But she really cannot: Impossible men are an issue for Anders, on screen and off, as she herself had confessed: “I don’t feel safe with men a lot of the times because inevitably I’m going to be made to feel like I’m crazy.”
After the film, Anders received numerous letters from teenage mothers who wanted to connect with one of their own. “I fell in love with it,” said Callie Khouri, Thelma and Louise‘s Oscar-winning scripter, who was a juror at Sundance Film Fest, where Anders’ film had premiered. “I was jealous of it in the best possible sense.”
Blessed by the N.Y. Film Critics Circle with a Best First Film Award, Gas Food Lodging has remained Anders’ best film, despite half a dozen features that had followed.
Credits:
Directed by Allison Anders
Screenplay by Anders, based on Don’t Look and It Won’t Hurt by Richard Peck
Produced by Carl Colpaert
Cinematography Dean Lent
Edited by Tracy Granger
Music by J Mascis
Distributed by Cineville
Release dates: Feb 24, 1992 (Berlin); July 10, 1992 (US)
Running time: 101 minutes
Budget $1.3 million
Box office $1.3 million
