Almost the Cocktail Hour

56 min. 16mm film, 1997

"A thoughtful and unique consideration of writer Jane Bowles as well as a sympathetic sketch of the desire to claim her, to connect with her, generations later."
– Carl Bogner, the Milwaukee Gay and Lesbian Film Festival

Almost the Cocktail Hour is a hybrid experimental narrative/biography that interprets Jane Bowles as a woman paralyzed by conflict—an expatriate, lesbian, alcoholic, and wife of the more celebrated writer Paul Bowles. A nameless woman sets out to find the grave of writer Jane Bowles, one of the eccentric characters in the art salon setting of New York and North Africa in the 1940s and ’50s. The nameless narrator’s pursuit transforms into a search for self-definition as she takes part in Jane's struggle to affirm her own experience as a writer unable to write.