In the very simple plot, Gertrude visits her doctor and is told that she has a rare and fatal disease. ''It's an attempt to get close to some reality about Gertrude and Alice, but to acknowledge from the beginning that it is fictitious,'' hence the obviously inaccurate renderings of the paintings on the set. ''Lonesome Pine'' is her first full-length feature. Godmilow's experiences when she attempted - and was forbidden - to make a documentary about the movement. Godmilow, a documentary film maker who received attention for her 1984 pseudo-documentary about the Solidarity movement, ''Far From Poland,'' a pastiche of Ms. ''You might call it probable or plausible fiction,'' said Ms. Magill says, a Cubist painting, it touches on no known incident. But, as it cuts in and out of five days in their lives, imitating, Mr. Magill's story tells, as he puts it, something that ''might have happened'' - given what the two American women were like. The first thing to know about ''Lonesome Pine,'' however, is that, aside from the presence of Stein and Toklas, Hemingway and Apollinaire, there is virtually nothing historical about the story - however well the spirit of their famous salon at 27 rue de Fleurus may have been captured. It might, as movies sometimes do, even establish in the public mind its own image of its major characters, Stein and Toklas, adding the film makers' vision to those of such notables as Picasso, Hemingway, and Sylvia Beach, who portrayed the two legendary and yet elusive American women in their own ways. So ''Lonesome Pine'' will be seen by a wide audience. It is due to open early next year in movie theaters in the United States, and it is scheduled to close the American Playhouse season on public television next June. Godmilow happily calls a ''real film,'' being professionally made in France with an international cast and French wine served during the lunch break. Magill thought they might shoot with friends for little more than the cost of the film itself. ''Lonesome Pine'' started out some months ago as a highly personal project that Ms. Hunt, are being paid union minimum wages ($1,370 a week in her case) the filming was accomplished in a brisk five weeks the set was uncomfortably close to a noisy sewage pump that switched on for 8 out of every 20 minutes at night, during which no filming could take place.īut nobody is complaining. Hunt, who won an Academy Award in 1983 for her portrayal of the Eurasian journalist Billy Kwan in ''The Year of Living Dangerously''), the set has all the appearances of an austere, belt-tight operation. And despite the presence of an established star (Ms. ''Lonesome Pine'' (the name of a song that was particularly liked by Gertrude Stein) is the creation of two fledgling feature film makers, Jill Godmilow, who is directing it, and Mark Magill, who wrote the script. A baby fathered by Apollinaire turns up in the garden, and Gertrude and Alice take care of him.Īll of these are elements of ''On the Trail of the Lonesome Pine,'' a low-budget movie that tells of an incident in the lives of the famous expatriate Americans who spent 40 years together. Ernest Hemingway, drunken and revelrous, makes appearances, as does the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire and Fernande Olivier, who was one of Pablo Picasso's many mistresses. Outside is a small, sunny garden where the two women go to sit on wicker chairs proofreading ''A Rose, Alice,'' one of Stein's early novels. Aoki in New York), hung casually akilter on the walls. The room - a recreation of the famous salon at 27 rue de Fleurus - is amply decorated with vaguely familiar paintings, intentionally inaccurate fakes of works by Picasso and Matisse (painted by H. Toklas,'' Gertrude Stein, being played by the British actress Linda Bassett. Toklas, wearing a black skirt and a silk blouse, a white sweater and gold earrings the other, larger and more robust, dressed in a studiously drab basic brown pleated skirt, a vest and sensible sandals is the legendary author of the ''Autobiography of Alice B. One, played by Linda Hunt, is a very delicate, almost porcelain Alice B. You drive through picturesque and seasonally golden fields of wheat northwest of Paris, and in this small town about half an hour from the city there is an old and somewhat dilapidated stone house where two rather dowdy, spinsterish, middle-aged women are talking to each other in front of movie cameras.
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