Girlfriends: Second Births

Essays—

Nov 10, 2020

The coming-of-age drama is generally thought of as portraying adolescence—the sexual awakening, the high-school cliques, the angst about the future. At least that’s the assumption on which Hollywood has profitably based its avalanche of teen pics for lo these many years. But the truly critical age, I would argue—where women are concerned, at any rate—is often our twenties. Once upon a time, marriage and a home over which to preside were a woman’s primary destiny; it was just a matter of who, when, and where. This was reinforced by popular culture. But with the sea change wrought by modern feminism, choice entered the picture; we were no longer set quite so firmly (or exclusively) on the path to matrimony, no longer expecting men to define us. Women might have vocations, interests, professional positions; initiate love affairs; marry without having children; postpone marriage; or not marry at all.

The turmoil and excitement, the fear and longing surrounding both ambition and love have rarely been captured with such vivid immediacy and emotional subtlety as in Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends (1978). With its low-budget production values and scruffy setting—the bohemian milieu of a now-vanished New York; the bell-bottoms, Afros, cheap apartments; the plonk wine at parties; a bit of weed here and there—the movie is a postcard from a specific era and place. At the same time, Weill’s narrative feature debut seems surprisingly fresh and undated. Which is to say that the goals and relationship quandaries navigated by the film’s two roommates, played by Melanie Mayron and Anita Skinner, are still on the front burner for many women; if anything, the vexations surrounding our emotional, professional, and domestic lives are more urgent now than ever. The pressure not just to have children, for example, but to devote a great deal of time and energy to nurturing them is far greater than it was in the seventies and eighties. Which explains why the conflicting demands of home and work, the attempts to sort out the strands of identity and resolve the simplest questions as to where one’s obligations lie, are the stuff of contemporary editorials, blog posts, and social-media salvos. If women have made strides as artists, executives, politicians, media stars, and athletes, many of the old conflicts remain, accompanied by new ones . . . or perhaps complications and elaborations of the old ones. After all, part of the autonomy gained by women over the past few decades has been the license to reckon openly with long-suppressed rage and anger, and to fess up to wayward fantasies.

By comparison, the feminism of the seventies was about presenting a united front in the push for things such as the legalization of abortion, the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, and pay parity at work. There were outliers, of course, like the anti-porn and anti-sex feminists, but there was an overall sense of cohesion, a proud solidarity, that occasionally glossed over divisions, within both the women’s movement and our private selves. Since then, it seems, we’ve gone through several cycles of desiring, then resisting, stark independence. Or reexamining just what that independence has come to look like, how compromised it actually is. But in fact, there was always a certain amount of ambivalence. We demanded our rights, rooms of our own, self-definition, yet some part of many of us still harbored secret and antithetical yearnings for a man who would fill the space we were claiming, close the gap, smother us. In Girlfriends, Weill explores the complexity of these dynamics.

The film appeared in what we can now recognize as a thrilling moment for women directors, as well as for the actresses for whom those directors created complex and central roles. The era may be best known for the maverick auteurs—almost all male—who were seizing the opportunity in a changing Hollywood to make personal films, in which they tended not to feel any obligation to create juicy roles for women. But off to the sides, a great deal was happening for women filmmakers, who, like Weill, often took as their subject matter, explicitly or obliquely, the plight of (predominantly white) women under the influence of the old order: in Europe, Margarethe von Trotta, Agnès Varda, Chantal Akerman, Marguerite Duras, Lina Wertmüller. In America, Barbara Loden, Elaine May, Joan Micklin Silver, Stephanie Rothman. These filmmakers didn’t tend to give their male characters the same short shrift male directors so often give their female ones, and indeed, in Girlfriends, Weill affords the husband, rabbi, and boyfriend characters as much empathy and humanity as she does the girlfriends.

We’re currently living in a time that, at least by comparison, seems like a golden age of gal-pal movies and TV, but we should remember just how much rarer such cultural products once were. Before Thelma & Louise came along in 1991, the buddies in conventional buddy films were invariably male. Women were still commonly thought to be congenital rivals, incapable of bonding, as the narrative space that they were given (getting a guy, basically) was so restricted. But, working outside the constraints of such systematized storytelling, Weill recognized and captured the ways in which women’s friendships were both similar to and different from love affairs, yet certainly every bit as complex—and probably more so.

After graduating from Harvard, Weill worked on short films—including many for Sesame Street, in its early years, along with the 1972 documentary Joyce at 34, which she codirected with Chopra and photographed, and which examines the effect of Chopra’s pregnancy on her filmmaking career. Weill then codirected with Shirley MacLaine and shot the Oscar-nominated documentary The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir (1975), which provides a look at a newly reopened China through the eyes of the first American women’s delegation to go there, but also glimpses of Americanness, in all its diversity, through the eyes of the people of China. Girlfriends began as a short film financed with ten thousand dollars from the American Film Institute; while developing a feature-length script written by Vicki Polon, Weill managed to scrape together grants and loans to fund its expansion into a feature.

Weill’s 1980 follow-up to Girlfriends, It’s My Turn, stars Jill Clayburgh in a performance as nervously incandescent as her turn in Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman, another woman-adrift-in-the-city romance, from two years earlier. In Weill’s film, Clayburgh is a math prof who is struck by a coup de foudre when she meets a man played by Michael Douglas and suddenly becomes dissatisfied with her coolly casual relationship with Charles Grodin’s Homer, their insistence on emotional space reflected in their sleek, impersonal apartment, their teasing banter coming at the cost of real intimacy. With a script by Eleanor Bergstein, who would go on to write Dirty Dancing, it’s a sparkly, of-the-moment rom-com, more polished than Girlfriends but also less personal.

“Girlfriends is, in the conditions of its making as well as in its story, a time capsule from an era of unbridled hope hedged by large doses of struggle, and it represents a pivotal moment in the culture.”

Weill has gone on to direct for theater and television over the intervening decades, including seminal episodes of such award-winning series as Thirtysomething, My So-Called Life, and Girls. But like so many of her contemporaries and the women who would follow them in the eighties (Lizzie Borden, Bette Gordon, Donna Deitch), she has not been given the opportunities she deserved to make feature films. As Manohla Dargis wrote in the New York Times in 1999, “Whatever happened to Lizzie Borden? Claudia Weill? Joyce Chopra? Donna Deitch? Whatever happened to Julie Dash, Tamra Davis, Stacy Cochran, Leslie Harris? . . . What all these women share is that each directed at least one—and, in some cases, two or more—provocative, critically acclaimed independent films, only to essentially disappear from the scene.” Girlfriends is, then, in the conditions of its making as well as in its story, a time capsule from an era of unbridled hope hedged by large doses of struggle, and it represents a pivotal moment in the culture. And the film itself has lived to be rediscovered and championed by new generations of filmmakers and cinephiles.

In the movie, the turbulent emotions of the time are distilled in the friendship between two women. As the relationship between Susan and Anne founders and recovers, then founders again, we feel we are watching their identities evolve before our eyes, in an ongoing “second birth” as it is unforgettably described in Max Ophuls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman. “I think everyone has two birthdays,” says Joan Fontaine in the film, “the day of his physical birth and the beginning of his conscious life.”

Girlfriends begins in the domestic untidiness—rumpled sheets on futons—of two young white women inhabiting their new and as yet unfurnished apartment, barely larger (one imagines) than a dorm room they might have shared at college. The girls are a contrast both visually and in terms of their ambitions: Anne (Anita Skinner) is blonde, pretty, not quite conventional, and a would-be poet. Melanie Mayron’s Susan is bespectacled, bushy-haired, and entrancing, a working photographer and more decided (it would seem) about what she wants for her future.

Susan is shooting the sleeping Anne, who awakens, protests, and then wants to read her latest poem to her roommate, but Susan is in a hurry to leave for a photography gig, a bar mitzvah. (Someday she will become a “real” professional, shooting art photography rather than the bar mitzvahs and weddings that constitute her current assignments.) Still, Anne makes her listen. Later, she speaks of her boyfriend, Martin (Bob Balaban): “I think I almost might love him.” “You think you almost might love him?” Susan cries in disbelief. All those equivocations don’t seem promising. Anne says, “He thinks I’m a dilettante,” to which Susan replies, “Maybe he’s not so blind.” Anne, vulnerable, wounded: “I can see you really take me seriously.” Susan: “I take you more seriously than you take yourself.”

And there you have, in a nutshell, the struggle between the desire of a young woman to be defined by a man—to have someone else shoulder responsibility, not just financially but psychologically as well—and her subversive, uncertain, and possibly dangerous longing to establish an independent identity. When Anne confesses that she wants Martin to take care of her, an exasperated Susan says, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Anne, you don’t need anyone to take care of you.” For Anne, the idea of self-sufficiency is both exhilarating and terrifying.

“How sturdy or how fragile is the delicate chemistry of a specific relationship? the movie asks. And: Can two people still be friends if one pulls ahead of the other?”

One of the singular achievements of Weill’s film is the way that she shows, almost moment by moment, the complicated ambivalence that can beset women’s friendships, something that even now is rarely shown on-screen with such extended nuance and delicacy. As if to emphasize the contrast between an inner life and a social one, the film frequently crosscuts between the apartment’s interior—often seen in isolated details, as if through the lens of Susan’s camera—and events that take place outside of it, such as Anne’s wedding. The interior scenes of the two women in their small, cozy flat exude a sense of safety, even when the girlfriends are at odds, disagreeing or challenging each other. The warm colors there contrast with chillier spaces—offices, galleries, and even the setting of the wedding itself, where the choreography of faces and voices suggests discomfort and confusion.

For Weill, weddings never represent a girl’s fairy-tale fantasies—see It’s My Turn—instead occasioning awkward moments and hints of half-buried resentments. The idea that Anne may be marrying a man who just happened along at the right time is conveyed by the brittle chaos of the event, as contrasted with the different, more congenial chaos of the apartment. Still, that sense of sisterhood is dramatically disrupted by Anne’s marriage, reflected in the image, juxtaposed with those of the wedding, of Susan alone in the new apartment, painting a cracked wall red—red for anger, red for defiance. It is the color she wanted to paint it when she and Anne looked at the place together, though Anne didn’t agree. Susan gets the wall she wants, but only by being left alone, and the pathos of that fact imbues her performance and the scene. Later, at a party with a guy, Eric (Christopher Guest), whom she is drawn to but wary of, she reports that she caught the bridal bouquet. After a moment: “Then I dropped it.”

At Girlfriends’ anguished heart is the terrible and unexpected trauma inflicted when one person deserts a friendship—here, it’s for marriage, but it could be for a better job or another partner or something else. Losing a close friend from one’s youth can be like losing a part of oneself—the sounding board, the devil’s advocate, the one through whose longings and tastes we begin our own process of differentiation, carve out our own future selves. Suddenly and savagely, that precious, never-to-be-recovered closeness, the delicious habit of sharing everything with another person, is cut off. I can remember, when close friends announced their engagements, feeling a pang in the pit of my stomach, made worse by the strain to feign unqualified delight. You see all that in Susan in the early scene at a laundromat in which Anne announces that she is going to marry Martin. Mayron’s face is a portrait of conflicting emotions: a lost look, immediately succeeded by a tremulous smile for her friend. The smile is genuine, but so is the pain.

Susan’s path to self-awareness takes her through encounters with a host of memorably, and often amusingly, portrayed subsidiary characters—Eli Wallach as the warm and unexpectedly seductive rabbi, Balaban as the uptight but not unkindly husband, Gina Rogak as a photographer friend who begins ahead of Susan and winds up being helped by her, Amy Wright as a dancer-hitchhiker who crashes with Susan temporarily, Viveca Lindfors and son Kristoffer Tabori as the gallerists who give Susan her first show, even Kenneth McMillan as a cabdriver who warns her about getting involved with a man who never had mumps as a child. This leads to a hilarious back-and-forth between Susan and Eric, whose relationship is drawn with the same evenhanded acuity as that of the girlfriends.

In the slightly wary friendship between Julie and Susan, we see again Weill’s deftness in capturing the play of contrary emotions—especially when Susan tells Julie about her gallery show. Before congratulating her with real joy, Julie reacts with that split second of hesitation, that moment of unpleasure, shameful but unavoidable, as if thinking, She’s done it and I haven’t; she’s pulled ahead of me. Girlfriends, like no other film I can think of, gets at the insidious but quite natural envy that can sabotage a friendship. How sturdy or how fragile is the delicate chemistry of a specific relationship? the movie asks. And: Can two people still be friends if one pulls ahead of the other? Pairings of people can diversify racially, sexually, and in terms of gender, but nothing in our newer forms of bonding can temper the pain of separation.

That this special loss is ancient and enduring but has rarely been so well expressed accounts for Girlfriends’ staying power. Anne, now with a child, is planning to go back to school—a prospect Susan regards with doubt (or envy?). In a relatively short space of time, we’ve been drawn into a rich and variegated drama. As they’ve gone their separate ways, both experiencing terrible disappointments and triumphs they couldn’t share with each other, straining but often failing to keep in touch, we’ve felt their agony, and longed for some healing rapprochement. The suspense is palpable: Can their bond survive Anne’s marriage? Our answer comes in the final shot, a glorious if tentative half-smile on Susan’s face.

Girlfriends: Second Births

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