Grab Your Pals And Watch The Emotionally Raw Girlfriends

Back in a 1980 interview, Stanley Kubrick remarked that a recent American film he adored was the Claudia Weill 1978 feature Girlfriends. Particularly interesting in his praise of the project was him noting bewilderment over it not doing well at the box office (as Kubrick can attest with his own works like 2001: A Space Odyssey, good films sometimes just can't translate quality to strong box office), how well-made the feature was and that it had a thoughtful quality that reminded him of European cinema. Heed the words of Stanley Kubrick dear reader, Girlfriends is very much worthy of the praise this iconic filmmaker heaped upon it.


Girlfriends tells the tale of photographer Susan Weinblatt (Melanie Mayron), and follows her everyday life over the course of a few years, starting with her best pal and roommate, Anne Munroe (Anita Skinner), moving out to settle down with her husband. Now Susan is left alone as she tries to track down any possible contacts who could help her inch her way forward in the artistic field she's pursuing as a career, an employment struggle this writer cannot possibly relate to in any way shape or form. Anywho, over the next couple of years, Susan has plenty of ups and downs in both her artistic pursuits as well as in her personal life, the latter of which entails romantic dead-ends, brief new roommates and attempts to keep in contact with Anne even when she moves out.

Kubrick comparing Girlfriends to European cinema does feel like an apt comparison, certainly this titles script, penned by Vicki Polon, feels like it owes plenty of influence to the types of intimate down-to-Earth character pieces that European auteurs like Agnes Varda are famous for. Like the best of those movies, Polon's writing succeeds due to how much of an emotional response it gets out of the viewer in even the most muted of terms. An especially exceptional instance of this trait is seen in a scene in Girlfriends where Susan goes over to the house of a married man she's supposed to have dinner with and it's here that the prospect of seeing a man who has to keep his relationship with Susan a secret is finally felt by Susan.

As the man's family, including his wife, scramble around the house getting ready for a football game (one that will ensure that this guy can't go with Susan to dinner), Susan is like a ghost to everyone in the house, even the man she's supposed to be romantically involved with. In the way this scene is written by Vicki Polon and directed by Claudia Weill, all the interior feelings of the protagonists are vividly felt by the audience without Susan having to break into a grand soliloquy about her emotional turmoil. In this sequence and throughout the rest of the movie, Girlfriends is able to maintain its heavily realistic nature while also succeeding in making the emotional experiences of the character Susan immensely striking.

The characters Susan encounters in her life strike a similar balance of fitting comfortable into realism while maintaining a sense of distinctiveness. I especially enjoyed Julie (Gina Rogak), an aspiring dancer Susan just picks up on the road one day that briefly becomes her new roommate. Julie's got a youthful sense of optimism to her that endures even when she's being told by Susan that she has to leave the apartment ASAP. Julie's personality also makes for an amusing comedic contrast to Susan's more frank spirit, a personality trait that lead performer Melanie Myron handles with an effortless sense of discernable authenticity just as she does with all the other complex parts of this protagonists persona. 

Rogak and Myron are working under director Claudia Weill whose assured work under the camera is critical to making the specific atmosphere of Girlfriends work as well as it does. Girlfriends is a movie all about everyday imperfections, the job you don't get, the friends you gradually drift away from, the romantic infatuations that slip through your fingers. Weill's emphasis on prolonged single-takes allow the underlying awkwardness or disappointment of these experiences to be felt in a profound manner. You squirm in your seat when Susan and Anne have a big confrontation not just because of how invested you are in these characters but also because Weill captures this scene in a way that fully maintains a sense of raw emotion. It's like we (much like Anne's husband for a moment) have stumbled into a moment of personal emotional rawness between two human beings rather than a scene from a motion picture. Directing a scene that well, that's how you end up with a superb movie like Girlfriends that captures the attention of Stanley Kubrick!