Cinema
Young women
Ted Whitehead
Girl Friends (Gate 2 and ABC Fulham Rd) Just when I've trained myself to discriminate between the use of 'girl' and 'woman' in exactly the same way as between 'boy' and 'man', along comes Claudia Weill with a study of women in their twenties called Girl Friends. You couldn't call a film about men in their twenties Boy Friends without being provocative; minorities apart, boyfriends are what girls have, as girlfriends are what boys have. But I see Miss Weill's problem: 'Young Women Friends' would be a mouthful, and 'Women Friends' would sound like a sociological essay. While there are plenty of words for male friends, such a pal, chum, mate, buddy, there are none for female, because of the traditional assumption that a woman only has friends until she gets what she really wants, i.e. a man. Girl Friends (AA) examines the conflict between friendship and marriage among the new generation of merry spinsters, the partisans of the independent woman's life.
The central character is Susan We inblatt, a New York photographer who makes a living out of weddings and barmitzvahs while trying to find a market for her more serious work. She's toothy, tousled and mypoic, a plain version of Annie Hall, and she shares a flat with the slightly prettier and much more conventional Anne, who wants to be a writer. Anne meets Martin, decides that she's in love and wants him to take care of her, and gets married. Over the next two years we watch Anne's struggle to attain solitude in marriage, and Susan's struggle to avoid solitude outside it.
Susan's first reaction to what she sees as her friends desertion is to go to a party, pick up a man and go to bed with him; but no sooner are they between the sheets than she's up and off. Months later she tells the man, who's a teacher called Eric, that she left him because she was just coming out of a heavy relationship. 'Were you living together?' he asks innocently. She flirts with a middle-aged Rabbi, horrifying Anne, who says that if he's fifty he must be married, and married men always go back to their wives. Anne has already learnt the moral that the value of a relationship lies strictly in its permanency. As it happens, the affair ends when the Rabbi skips a date with Susan because he has to take his wife and son to the ball game. Her reaction to this rejection is to make a virtue of solitude. She throws out Celia, a Lesbian dancer who has somehow infiltrated her apartment, and puts her energies into her career, doing the rounds of the galleries in the hope of getting a show.
The short scenes flit by with ,elliptical speed. A radiant Anne announces that she is pregnant. An exhausted Anne sits at the typewriter while Martin searches the kitchen for applejuice and Junior crawls around the floor. A furious Anne bawls out Susan for arriving late for dinner, accusing her of being in bed with Eric (who wouldn't come anyway, because he wanted to stay in and watch the football on TV). When Susan counters by saying that, well, it was Anne who left her in the first place, the matron replies: didn't leave you —I got married.'
It's obvious that the old easy, bantering intimacy has gone forever, but in its place the two women are developing a relationship that is tougher' and more truthful. We're left uncertain at the end, when Anne has just had an abortion without telling her husband, and confides in Susan; for a moment the old conspiratorial warmth is restored, but it's spoiled by the arrival of Martin. Anne will persist with her marriage, but obviously she'll do it on her own terms without yielding too much of her independence. Susan meanwhile has had her first exhibition, but owing to her own inefficiency has missed the opportunity to include her favourite photograph. 'You'll have to grow up,' says the gallery owner. There's no doubt that Susan will learn to cope with commercial realities, but whether she'll get much joy from her relationships, in a society that clings to marriage like somebody clinging to a punctured dinghy, is anybody's guess. Melanie Mayron plays this central role brilliantly, and is well supported by Anita Skinner and Eli Wallach. Vicki Polon's screenplay is pointed without being propagandist, and often very funny. The night I saw the film, the cinema was packed with couples, by which I mean girlfriends, empathising like mad. It's obviously the right title after all.
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