Dir. Claudia Well
Year. 1978
Country: US
Run-time: 88 mins
Rating: 15
Doors: 5.30 pm
Film: 6.00 pm
10% discount on drinks. Just show your ticket at the bar.
“Claudia Weill’s 1978 comic tale of a photographer trying to make it in New York is a gem whose emotional force comes from the female friendships at its heart”
Girlfriends is a 1978 American comedy-drama film produced and directed by Claudia Weill and written by Vicki Polon. The film stars Melanie Mayron as Susan Weinblatt, a Jewish photographer who experiences loneliness once her roommate Anne (Anita Skinner) moves out of their apartment in New York City. It was the first American independent film to be funded with grants, but private investors helped complete the film.
Although the film began shooting in November 1975, it took almost three years to complete because the initial budget of $80,000 ran out. After distribution was picked up by Warner Bros., the film was released on August 11, 1978.
In 2019, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant"
A photographer and her girlfriend are roommates. She is stuck with small-change shooting jobs and dreams of success. When her roommate decides to get married and leave, she feels hurt and has to learn how to deal with living alone.
“One of the great cinematic injustices of the late 20th century is that while Woody Allen’s name became synonymous with the neurotic artist living in New York City, Claudia Weill and her debut feature Girlfriends was largely forgotten. Long before Girls In The Big City became a common trope, via the films of Nora Ephron to Sex and the City and Lena Dunham’s Girls, Girlfriends was one of the first films to capture the nuances and complexities of female friendship and the frightening loneliness of freedom.”
“Girlfriends was one of the first films to remove male-centric narratives from its major plot points. Romantic interactions with men form its secondary stories, not its primary ones. Instead, it follows two friends, Susan Weinblatt (Melanie Mayron) and Anne Munroe (Anita Skinner), as they navigate their changing, individual lives alongside, and sometimes in reaction to, their relationship with each other.
Susan and Anne start out sharing a one-bedroom apartment in New York City, piled with boxes and bereft of ornamentation save for Anne’s mattress on the living room floor. Jewish and bespectacled Susan is an aspiring photographer, while slim, WASP-y Anne is an aspiring writer.
Theirs is a close friendship with nebulous boundaries, as so many friendships between young women are, with Susan photographing Anne in the early morning light while she sleeps, and Anne asking for feedback on a poem while Susan uses the bathroom.”
