Although writer-director Allison Anders adapted the story from the young adult novel Don't Look and It Won't Hurt by Richard Peck, she drew on her own difficult childhood as the daughter of an itinerant single mother for this story of a waitress raising her teenage daughters in a rural New Mexico trailer park. Although not widely seen by general audiences, enthusiastic reviews and positive attention on the film festival circuit assured Gas Food Lodging would not be just another overlooked gem of American independent cinema. Noting its wry humor and sympathetic characterizations, Time Out called it “delightfully oddball and strangely sane,” while The New York Times’ Janet Maslin said, “Anders keeps her film expertly balanced between quiet despair and a sense of the miraculous.” Brooke Adams, previously known for her work in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) and The Dead Zone (1983), plays the mother, with Ione Skye and Fairuza Balk as her daughters. In a 2001 interview, Balk said the film was closest to her heart because of the similarities between her and the shy loner she plays. She won the Independent Spirit Award for her work here, while Anders garnered two prizes at the Deauville Film Festival and Best New Director from the New York Film Critics Circle. Also in the cast are James Brolin as the girls’ long-absent father and Skye’s brother, Donovan Leitch Jr. Adding to the family atmosphere of the production are the director’s daughter, Tiffany Anders, and Balk’s mother, Cathryn, in minor roles. Anders mined certain harsh details of her early life for a later picture, Things Behind the Sun (2001). In recent years, she has directed a number of television shows and holds a distinguished professorship in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara.

by Rob Nixon