Gas Food Lodging
A film written and directed by Allison Anders
Starring Brooke Adams, Ione Skye and Fairuza Balk
Showing in Melbourne at the Kino
Reviewed by Peter Boyle
Allison Anders' debut film is something special. She demolishes mass media stereotypes of the "broken home" and the "single mother" in this funny, sometimes sad but always hopeful look at the lives of three women in the USA in the 1990s.
Nora (Brooke Adams) is a single mother who works as a waitress in a roadhouse in outback New Mexico and lives with her two teenage daughters in a caravan park. The film is about their mutual relationship and about their relationships with men.
"Women need men like a fish needs a bicycle", was one slogan in the early days of the modern feminist movement. However, problematic as it may be in this sexist age, many women do seek meaningful relationships with men. But while the romantic ideal preaches otherwise, reality demands they find strength and independence first. Anders deals deftly and subtly with this question in Gas Food Lodging.
Nora's youngest daughter, Shade (Fairuza Balk), narrates with the blunt honesty and hope of early adolescence. Addicted to romantic Spanish movies, she tries to reconcile her reality with romantic myths, but real men don't seem to measure up as they roll through their lives like tumbleweed. In one scene Nora says to a former lover, "Women in the '90s are lonely — it's a phase we're going through".
The surreal desert setting adds magic, awesome beauty and some over-the-top symbolism. It contrasts sharply with shabby little Laramie, New Mexico. But the small town setting also focuses attention on the big story of the lives of women who might be dismissed as "marginalised" or even "dysfunctional" by many social commentators, although in the 1990s they are no small minority.
Female characters who don't fit the middle-class and upper-class stereotypes have gradually forced their way onto the big screen in recent years, but more often than not as cliches. Even Thelma and Louise — widely hailed as a popular feminist film last year — did not break from cliche to the extent that Gas Food Lodging does.
Anders has drawn strongly on her own experience (raised by a single mother, she too raised two daughters by herself while living on welfare and casual waitressing) to turn a story from an obscure novel written by a man into a convincing and memorable tale of strong women.
"As I read the book I kept thinking, 'This is me, these are my issues'.", she recalls. She had to reshape the script — daring to expose for the first time the most dismaying, embarrassing and poignant moments from her life as mother, daughter and single woman, she says.
Because this film is also a story of the alienation and hope that combine in the broader human condition, it speaks powerfully to many men as well as women.