Free France

Doing it their way in Paris Was a Woman

Film Culture, by Gerald Peary

This is when the critic's job is joyful: a movie I can recommend to practically everybody, and without reservations. Paris Was a Woman, October 25 and 26 at the Brattle Theatre, is a vastly entertaining, learned, delightfully revisionist documentary take on literary Paris of the 1920s. Forget Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, and the usual cast of boozy, disruptive male geniuses. A persuasive case is made by director Greta Schiller and screenwriter Andrea Weiss (who formerly collaborated on the gay-and-lesbian history Before Stonewall) that post-World War I Paris served its artistic-minded expatriate women best of all.

As Schiller told me when we talked recently at the Vancouver Film Festival: "One of our fascinations with 1920s Paris was the attempts people made to find new ways of living, how this group of women, mostly lesbians, reconstructed their lives. They were all interested in literature and the arts, and they were very much part of the dominant culture."

In her Harper Collins book version of Paris Was a Woman, Weiss calls the sexual freedom of the Left Bank "freedom from the heterosexual imperative." Or as Gertrude Stein characterized her life among Parisians: ". . . their life belongs to them so your life can belong to you."

It all began with expatriates Stein and Alice B. Toklas; afterward, Paris swarmed with other talented lesbian artists: novelist Djuna Barnes, journalist Janet Flanner, photographer Gisele Freund, writer Natalie Barney, booksellers/publishers Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach. Paris Was a Woman interweaves their remarkable biographies, filling out its 1920s Paris with buoyant chansons, choice movie moments (from dancer Josephine Baker and surrealist filmmaker Germaine Dulac), and juicy interviews.

The documentary leans often on two revelatory "found" 1960s-era TV-camera reminiscences. The first is with sweet Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the English-language bookstore Shakespeare and Company, where the famous gathered. The second is with tart, gruff Janet Flanner, who, as "Genet," wrote the "Letter from Paris" column in the New Yorker.

Why does Beach talk so politely, and only about the male writers who came to her store?

"Well, once a minister's daughter, always a minister's daughter," surmised director Schiller. "Also, her London questioner only asked her about men. On the other hand, Janet Flanner didn't listen to questions, so she got in all that stuff she wanted, and we wanted, about Gertrude Stein and other women.

"We found actual footage of a German interviewing Alice B. Toklas. Yet all they talked about was Hemingway! We wanted to die! One reason we were able to interview Gisele Freund was that, after chasing her through three European cities, I questioned her about Sylvia Beach. Nobody had asked her about the women, said Freund, who allows no interviews about her knowing Walter Benjamin and Joyce."

Schiller explained why she and Weiss decided not to use the word "lesbian" within the film. "Even though these women lived lesbian lives, `identity politics' didn't exist then. So we tried to stay true to the time and place and seduce you into the time and place. To this day, Freund talks about her `friend,' and others say `lifetime companion.' Remember, Alice was Gertrude's `secretary!' "

Schiller and Weiss, Americans now living in London, plan to develop Paris Was a Woman into a fiction feature centered on the love-and-literature affair of Beach and Monnier.

My talk with Schiller (the friendliest of filmmakers) moved to casting. We decided that Holly Hunter would be a swell Sylvia Beach. Was she planning to include Joyce in her new film? Schiller smiled mischievously. "Wouldn't it be funny to use guys like Joyce and Hemingway only as drunken secondary characters getting pissed at the bar?"

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Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994) was a winning Ed Jr., Johnny Depp's unflappable American optimist who was utterly happy to wear women's undergarments and helm odious "Z"-budget films. Since, I've read Rudolph Grey's Wood oral history, Nightmare of Ecstasy, and seen Brett Thompson's screen bio, The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr., which is getting a midnight screening this Friday and Saturday (October 25 and 26) at the Coolidge Corner. And Wood's life seems less humorous, more pathetic.

For one thing, his fame is all posthumous. When Wood lived, nobody noticed the nonpareil zaniness of Plan 9 from Outer Space or applauded the cross-dressing lunacy of Glen or Glenda. Also, there were major demons in his life, and Wood's last years were alcohol ugly. He wrote trashy porn novels to pay for his liquor; he died in 1978 three days after being evicted from his cheap LA apartment.

The Haunted World brings back to the screen a documentary "B"-list of still-extant thespians to elegize their long-dead mentor. A bit funny, definitely depressing.