Girlfriends

(Claudia Weill/1978/USA)

34 years before Lena Dunham scored a TV hit with Girls Claudia Weill wrote the blueprint for the series with her film Girlfriends. No surprise then that Weill guest directed an episode in season two or that Dunham has identified the film as a lodestone on occasion. Made on a shoestring budget the film shows Susan, an aspiring art photographer paying the bills with portrait and bar mitzvah work, and her best friend Anne, an aspiring writer, living together in a small apartment in downtown New York. The low cost production has in the course of time added a charm and quality of its own to the film but the themes and storylines are still totally relevant today. In fact in its depiction of female relationships and that particular mid to late twenties period of life, Girlfriends has captured something universal that resonates across time. The settings, fashions and social mores may change but the nuts and bolts of emotional entanglements, interdependences and rivalries between women generally stay the same as they do for men or humans in general. Claudia Weill doesn’t compromise her characters in her portrayal of their navigations of that maze of young womanhood. Susan is a strong, ambitious and creative woman with the same fears, worries and desires as most of us. Girlfriends is a great movie and its influence can be seen down through the years not just in Girls but in other productions like Sex in the City, Ghostworld or Frances Ha amongst others. Whilst it was critically well received at the time and Weill went on to make another movie or two, her career in film never really took off and she moved into TV work in the late 80’s. But with Girlfriends she dropped a pebble in the cinematic pond and the ripples from that are still undulating outwards to today.

(3/5)