Forest Whitaker’s “Waiting to Exhale” is perhaps the quintessential “chick flick”—and an ideal case study for all that the cinematic subgenre can do. The “chick flick” often concerns heroines in the midst of personal transformation, and it’s capacious enough to enfold romantic comedies (“You’ve Got Mail”), tragedies (“The Notebook”), friendship fables (“Beaches”), and mother-daughter dramedies (“Terms of Endearment”). Its conventions are cosmic: the serendipitous, life-altering “meet-cute” is sometimes a literal collision, if not a metaphorical one, and chance encounters have a way of adding up. Well-placed songs provide relief; mood and weather mix, as in “Moonstruck.” “Exhale,” about four women friends who support one another through a series of interpersonal crises, fits in the matrilineal musing, the music, the camaraderie, the pathetic fallacy—when one character finally ends her sexual dry spell, rain falls in the desert. These movies show women exploring their options, taking steps to pursue goals and love connections. In Whitaker’s film, the protagonists are in different stages of nursing grief and developing new relationships. Because change is an act fraught with anxiety and confusion, the quartet spends the movie processing with one another, rhapsodizing, backsliding, and searching for moments to release—to let themselves breathe.
In February, New York’s Metrograph theatre hosted the Divorced Women’s Film Festival, screening “Waiting to Exhale” along with other cinematic depictions of dissolution, including “The Age of Innocence,” “The First Wives Club,” and “The War of the Roses.” Haley Mlotek, the program’s curator and the author of a book on the sociocultural impact of no-fault divorces, explained that the movies she chose “are classics not because they are reflections of life, exactly, but because they can be visions of our feelings.” Her selections center on women with emotional foresight who are also on the cusp of realizing what they truly want. As a divorced woman in her mid-thirties who was about to make a career pivot, I could relate to those characters in flux. I went to see “Waiting to Exhale” just after Valentine’s Day.
When “Exhale” premièred, thirty years ago today, I was six, and far too young to watch it, so I experienced it as a mystery of language and gesture and unspoken reference. Then, the film’s milieu was my mother’s: full of romantic crosstalk, long-distance phone calls, rueful rhythm and blues, and the kinds of brilliantly made-up faces I associated with Fashion Fair Cosmetics, where she was a counter manager. In the interim between her years as a thirtysomething and mine, the movie has existed as an artifact of the relatively edgy “it’s the” nineties, and, owing to its Grammy-winning, multiplatinum soundtrack, a hallmark in the history of tie-in marketing. Babyface, who produced the album and wrote or co-wrote all but one of its songs, did so after reading the screenplay; an intergenerational all-star cast of soul, R. & B., and pop acts like Houston, Aretha Franklin, Mary J. Blige, Chaka Khan, Brandy, and TLC, underscores the narrative.
Adapted from Terry McMillan’s best-selling 1992 novel of the same name, “Exhale” is equal parts “women’s picture,” a.k.a. weepie, Black women’s “chick flick,” and precursor to sitcoms like “Girlfriends” and “Insecure.” The film, which inaugurated a spate of adaptations of other McMillan novels, also marked a watershed moment in the representation of the Black professional class. The subject of talk-show chats, watch parties, and discussion dinners—organized and attended by the likes of Gayle King, no less—when it premièred, the film became as much a sociological phenomenon as an artistic one. In a 1995 story for the New York Times, the reporter Karen de Witt declared that “ ‘Waiting to Exhale,’ the movie, is rapidly proving to be ‘Waiting to Exhale,’ the event,” and quoted a woman who said, of the collective filmgoing experience, “This is our ‘Million Man March.’ ’’ As an adult, I’d rented and streamed the film alone; at Metrograph, I got to see it for the first time with other people.
