Girlfriends

With their indie work, director Claudia Weill and screenwriter Vicki Polon blazed a trail for the subsequent generation of filmmakers. They made their feature debut in primitive conditions with the enthusiasm and hard work of everyone involved at a time when the American film industry was, at least in the context of the studios, the domain of men, as well of stars and big stories. By contrast, Girlfriends was made entirely independently and presents a casually informal, immediately candid and bittersweetly funny portrait of women, their friendships and relationships in a style that had never been seen before. Weill and Polon convey their theme through the character of a young woman in her twenties who lives with her friend in New York, where she is trying to become a professional photographer. As she stumbles indecisively through her professional and adult life, she half-involuntarily achieves inner maturity through the way her network of relationships is transformed under the influence of professional, friendship and relationship peripetias. If this is conspicuously reminiscent of the premise of several decades of more recent festival and television hits, that is no coincidence, because their creators drew inspiration from it (e.g. Lena Dunham) or shamelessly copied it (e.g Noah Baumbach). But Girlfriends differs from its modern neurotic and chaotically abstracted successors in its mesmerising civility and immediate intimacy, which are derived from the director’s documentarian roots. With its subtly progressive approach to storytelling, the elliptical narrative highlights minor moments in everyday lives, where personality traits and tangled lines of relationships come shining through. Gestures, details of the setting and, mainly, the movement of the characters themselves in authentic locations take on greater importance. Thanks to that, even many decades after it was made, Girlfriends remains not only a great time capsule of New York in the late 1970s, but mainly an absorbing and honest look at interpersonal relationships and the still complicated process of growing up at an age when we tell ourselves that we are already adults, after all. (11/07/2022)