MOVIES TO DISCOVER: Claudia Weill’s 1978 GIRLFRIENDS by Craig Hammill

One of the truths that keeps you humble (and makes you humbler) as you age is the realization that many great works (like all of existence) are subject to the vagaries and chances of time and fate.

Some great movies are ahead of their time and take ten or twenty years to really be seen. Other great movies are great in their moment then get forgotten or dismissed because of changing tides and tastes and times, only to become relevant again when the reaction-counter reaction subsides.

Some movies get recognized for being important and visionary but never seem to completely break into the mass consciousness like other movies.

Such a movie is Claudia Weill’s 1978 Girlfriends. A movie that maybe was twenty to thirty years ahead of its time.  A movie that predates and predicts filmmakers like Greta Gerwig, Richard Linklater, Andrew Bujalski.

A movie that none other than Stanley Kubrick in a 1980 interview for The Shining hailed as one of his favorite American movies of the 1970’s because “It seemed to make no compromise to the inner truth of the story, you know, the theme and everything else…” (a point it would make sense Kubrick himself would appreciate).

Girlfriends directed by Weill, written by Vicki Polon (from a story created by Polon and Weill) follows a few years in the life of aspiring photographer Susan Weinblatt after her best friend and roommate waspish Anne Monroe moves out of their apartment, gets married, has a baby.  . .

The movie opens with a few scenes of Susan and Annie’s friendship as striving artists, single and carefree, in New York City. But almost immediately Anne falls in love, gets married, and Susan feels stranded, abandoned, adrift.

From there, the movie follows Susan through hook ups, quirky roommates, ill-advised affairs, boyfriends, occasional hang outs with Anne as Anne settles into the domestic life, and increasingly frustrating attempts to catch a break as a professional photographer.

What’s so wonderful about the movie is that even though it captures New York City life in the late 1970’s it just as well could be Echo Park life in the early 2000’s or life for many of us, regardless of city, as we try to figure out who we are, what we want, where we want to be going when our only responsibility is to pay rent and have something to eat in the fridge.

Girlfriends also surprises with its cast. A very young Christopher Guest and Bob Balaban (did they meet on this shoot so they could work together in Guest’s mockumentaries?!) show up as Susan and Anne’s love interests respectively. And Eli Wallach (that’s right ,Tuco himself from The Good The Bad and The Ugly) has a wonderful supporting part as a middle aged Rabbi with whom Susan briefly falls in love. 

The movie is a marvel of quiet, steady, funny honesty.  Weill and her team clearly are all on the same page as to what movie they’re making because no one overacts or gets melodramatic. All the scenes pulse with that ever rare and sought after cinematic elixir: the illumination of truth that infuses work that commits to the sincere observation.

In some ways (and don’t worry, no spoilers here), the movie ends as idiosyncratically and herky-jerky as it starts.  This programmer was actually shocked by a last scene revelation of a main character who makes a very definitive choice. 

But Weill and her actors, rather than sensationalizing the choice, treat it in a much more integrated, even handed way.  And as a male filmmaker, this programmer found himself wondering and considering and wrestling with the difference between how men and women might view, react, consider the decision and the scene. 

Ultimately, this Programmer finished the movie as undecided and indeterminate about the decision as possibly the characters themselves. Or maybe the characters were more determinate about the decision than the audience. Whatever the truth, it’s a thought provoking and fascinating final scene.   

You get the wonderful feeling that while the characters have definitely grown, learned, gained realizations, they are also clearly still very much at the beginning of their lives’ journeys and have many more mistakes, triumphs, successes, missteps to make.  Just like all our lives.

It’s so hard to make the everyday conversations, situations, and dilemmas that affect most of our lives cinematic. Often, at least especially in American cinema, these kinds of movies can either veer left to the overly precious or right to the elevated remove of big Hollywood storytelling.

But Claudia Weill navigates the Scylla and Charybdis of these two pitfalls by steering his movie true through the choppy tides so that it is BOTH messy in its rhythms AND hilarious and cinematic in its scene-making and progress.

Maybe no surprise (though sad and frustrating), Weill found the move to bigger budget moviemaking in the early 1980’s to be sexist and unfair.  She found her experience as the director of the Hollywood movie It’s My Turn to be miserable as many of her choices were questioned by the male producer who had hired her for her vision in the first place.  Thereafter Weill focused on theater, TV movies, and TV episodes (she even directed Lena Dunham’s Girls-a clear spiritual descendant of Girlfriends). 

But she still made a crown jewel of 1970’s American cinema. One that only grows in its luster and importance as the passing years burnish and refine it so that we all can see its importance in the American cinematic firmament.

So if you’re looking for a great movie to discover, seek this one out. It will move and surprise and remind you of all the messiness of that indeterminate time when your whole life was in front of you but you sometimes felt like you couldn’t even get the car started to leave the driveway and make some progress down the road.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.