MOVIE REVIEW : ‘WAITING FOR MOON’ WITH STEIN, TOKLAS

The French call “Waiting for the Moon” “an imaginary biography,” and this time they are to be taken seriously. This look at the intertwined lives of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas is film biography of an audacious and tender nature, one that mixes what was with what might have been with a sure and ingenious hand. (It opens Friday at the Goldwyn Pavilion Cinemas.)

If, going in, you knew nothing about this famous pair, not even Gertrude Stein’s sentiments on roses, what you will have absorbed by the end of “Waiting for the Moon” is the essence of a 39-year relationship, distilled with formidable insight and played with consummate artistry. And although none of the dialogue is true Stein, screenwriter Mark Magill has constructed the film in rhythms uncannily like hers.

Magill and director Jill Godmilow (collaborator on the story with Magill) have braided their time frame ingeniously. The outer framework takes place in the garden of the women’s country home in the South of France as Gertrude (Linda Basset) and Alice (Linda Hunt) proofread a Stein manuscript in the company of a very young and unexplained baby named Willie. The scenes progress like shadows on a sundial, early to late, during the course of one day.

Interspersed between the proofreading scenes are vignettes from the women’s lives over a three-month period: picnicking at moonrise with poet Guillaume Apollinaire; gossiping at the tobacconist’s; driving in the country in Gertrude’s famous Model A Ford, Priscilla; responding to a questionnaire from the Ladies’ Home Journal--bedrock turned into poetry, with a motion as deft as skimming stones on the surface of a lake.

The surface of the film is droll; the badinage between Alice and Gertrude is ironic and affectionate, but the emotions beneath the civility are volcanic. It is 1936, a crucial summer in the lives of the literary Miss Stein and the saintly Miss Toklas. The doctor informs Gertrude that she is sick, possibly fatally, but she will not share the fact with Alice. Alice knows anyway. She reads Gertrude’s mail.

The struggle that ensues is monumental, but it is a battle ofwits and wills--Alice needs to speak about the situation, to be of comfort to Gertrude, to be comforted herself. Gertrude’s plan is not to confront the news at all. As Alice comments, dryly: “Facts did not mean much to Gertrude. Ideas were much more real.”

This is dangerous material. Make many false steps when your battlefield is as interior and delicate as this and you risk putting your audience straight to sleep. But the poignancy that underlies the peppery encounters between these two, the clear sense of what each one felt she had to lose, make this internal dilemma electric. No small credit goes to the commanding intelligence of both Hunt and Bassett (an English theater actress in a splendid film debut) whom Godmilow has guided to performances suffused with affection and understanding.

The second trap “Waiting for the Moon” sidesteps is the Famous Persons pothole. Because the Stein/Toklas salon was a crossroads of the literary and artistic world of the Lost Generation, what must be avoided are scenes strewn with such remarks as, “Pablo can’t come this evening--it’s those demoiselles d’Avignon again!”

To his great credit, writer Magill has given us a behind-the-scenes sense of this heady period with very little such nonsense. The Ernest Hemingway character is, admittedly, a trial, and Bruce McGill’s performance in the role is the film’s shakiest link. But if you look for pluses, they abound. There is Andrew McCarthy’s endearing and restrained creation of the young hitchhiker, on his way to fight in Spain, or Jacques Boudet’s marvelous Apollinaire--exactly what a poet should be. And straw-hatted, cherry-lipped Bernadette Lafont is enchanting as Picasso’s sometimes love, Fernande Olivier.

And even if the film mixes its actual periods and characters quixotically, a strong literary thread runs through it. The magnificent last scene, a muted drama of reconciliation and optimism, can bring you to tears. It does so especially when you notice that Magill has included Gertrude’s actual last words, “What is the question?” and played them off against a ringing series of “Yes”es from Alice that are true affirmations of life--and echoes from another great contemporary, James Joyce.

What a civilized delight “Waiting for the Moon” is. It has the tang of fine language, the breadth of its subject matter, the beauty of its settings, photography and music and a rare maturity in its outlook. All this, and an evening with Linda Hunt too. What an oasis for the parched adult. (The extremely tasteful film, incidentally, is rated PG.)

‘WAITING FOR THE MOON’ American Playhouse Theatrical Films in association with Skouras Pictures presents a production of New Front Films, A.B. Films and the Laboratory for Icon and Idion; co-produced by La Societe Francaise de Production, in association with ARD/Degeto and Channel 4. Producer Sandra Schulberg. Executive producer Lindsay Law. Director Jill Godmilow. Screenplay Mark Magill from a story by Godmilow and Magill. Line producer/production manager Frederic Bourboulon. Associate producer Barbara Lucey. Camera Andre Neau. Production design Patrice Mercier. Music Michael Sahl. Editor George Klotz. With Linda Hunt, Linda Bassett, Bernadette Lafont, Bruce McGill, Jacques Boudet, Andrew McCarthy.

Running time: 1 hour, 28 minutes.

MPAA-rated: PG (parental guidance suggested).