In some ways, the most puzzling question Girlfriends poses for the contemporary viewer is, Why does this film seem at once so time-bound and so timely? My impression is that, by pointing her camera toward these girlfriends, Weill was tapping into bedrock: the struggle a creative woman faces within a patriarchal order and, more specifically, what it takes for her to hold on to her honest voice and to be truly a friend. Despite all the social advances of the years since the film was made, certain facts remain unchanged. Chalk it up to the persistence of patriarchy, its stealthy power despite how clearly it goes against democratic ideals and values. And kudos to Weill for recognizing, even in the seventies, that it’s not only women who suffer patriarchy’s ravages. We see them engraved on the face of the rabbi in that excruciating moment when the camera lingers there, after it becomes clear that he can’t go to lunch with Susan, and we recall the earlier scene in which we witnessed his delight in imitating Marcel Marceau. He had wanted to be an actor but sacrificed an artistic life—the life that Susan reawakens in him—in capitulation to a manhood that required him to renounce a part of himself.

I recall my surprise at the film’s ending when I first saw it, and my gut sense of its rightness. After Anne goes to the country instead of attending Susan’s opening, Susan follows her there. In essence, Anne goes to herself and Susan goes to Anne, bringing a bottle of tequila. In contrast to the gallery party, this will be the true celebration, affirming them both as artists and friends. Believing that with a second child she would have no time to write, Anne has just had an abortion. In bed, playing solitaire, she apologizes to Susan for not coming to her show. “I’m sorry. I just couldn’t . . .” she explains. In fact, by making this commitment to herself as a writer, she has shown up for their friendship.

Anne’s is not a pro forma apology. Susan knows her friend’s vulnerabilities, and the estrangement between them that began with Anne’s marriage suddenly falls away. Anne didn’t tell Martin about the abortion beforehand because she was afraid he would talk her out of it; “I feel like such a coward,” she confesses. But Susan says that she is the coward: “I’m afraid—of being left.” “I know you are,” Anne says softly. In truth, both women are scared. Ground has shifted, polarities have collapsed. It was the compassionate Eric, Susan’s boyfriend, who changed the language earlier in the film, replacing selfish (patriarchal speak for “bad woman”) with scared. “Do you think I’m selfish?” Susan asked him after Anne called her that during an argument. “No,” Eric said, “scared.” It’s another of way of saying she is human. But it also underscores the courage it takes for a woman to defy the patriarchal injunction to render herself “selfless” and to include herself in the compass of her care.

It’s on this terrain that Anne and Susan, two women choosing to be artists, join to lead independent lives, to have voices of their own, taking risks and being scared. Weill does not put her thumb on the scale. In a film in which Susan says, “There’s no truth like bullshit,” we are cautioned against any easy summation. In its limning of the intricacies of a friendship between women in the days of second-wave feminism, when women were coming to acknowledge one another in new ways, this is a singular story.

At the film’s beginning, as Susan rushes to leave for work, Anne reads her the poem she is writing. (In fact, the poem is by Honor Moore.) “I have a war with my mother,” Anne begins, and, as she continues—“this war could be the longest war in history, maybe longer than a hundred years”—we grasp the scope of what Weill has taken on. But while Anne’s poem says, “I do not fight this war. My strategy is disengagement,” Susan and Anne engage and fight.

Sisterhood is crucial to ending patriarchy, but genuine sisterhood is not easy: it entails conflict and challenge, engaging with difference and honest confrontation. Not all relationships between women have this revolutionary potential; in the film, for example, Ceil, who is something of a freeloader, is not a true girlfriend in the sense Weill intends. Perhaps it would be accurate to say that what every woman needs is such a girlfriend: someone who takes you more seriously than you take yourself.