Passing Acquaintances

USED TO BE, life at the movies was faster, meatier, and larger than what we saw every day. The women were hotter, and their men were cooler. Enemies sought an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but friendship was thicker than blood. As Pauline Kael put it, it was "kiss kiss, bang bang."

Girl Friends, directed and produced by Claudia Weill '68, is a small movie. It's not that nothing happens, but when it's all over, you wonder if it was worth the trip. What you see on the screen is hardly more engaging than watching your neighbors. A lot of water passes under the bridge, but somehow it never reaches the other side. What does emerge is a very warm and compelling portrait of a young woman, Susan Weinblatt. But however appealing her character is, so little is required of her that we remain uninvolved. She ends up very much the way she started off.

Susan (Melanie Mayron) is a New York Jewish girl paying her dues as a photographer on the bar mitzvah and wedding circuit while waiting to hit the big-time. Her roommate and closest friend, Ann (played rather woodenly by Anita Skinner) is an aspiring poet who leaves Susan to get married. Susan painfully adjusts to living alone, her career advances sporadically, and after floundering awkwardly through two romantic attempts, she finally settles down comfortably in love.

WEILL'S APPARENT PURPOSE is to focus on the friendship of the two women, but she shifts to a study of Susan. While it is Mayron's performance which makes Susan such an attractive and humorous character, not all the problems with the character of Ann stem from Skinner's weak performance. Ann hovers in stereotypically suburban settings, seeming not only distant from Susan, but from the camera as well. One finds her cold and unsympathetic, and even the original friendship seems implausible at times.

Mayron as Susan, on the other hand, simply charms the camera. She may not look as good as Jill Clayburgh in bikini panties and t-shirt, but she is by far the superior comic actress. Who else could convincingly pull off a brief affair with a 50-year-old rabbi? She's not only good with a funny line; she uses her extraordinarily expressive face and body, too, captivating Rabbi Gold (Eli Wallach), and the audience as well.

The lopsided presentation of the two roles of Susan and Ann gives Mayron more of the spotlight, but at the expense of an involving plot. Weill's documentary style uses everyday situations to reveal changes in the attitudes of the characters. Susan, however, holds the screen alone for so much of the film and so dominates it even when Ann appears that the film seems to be a celluloid diary of Susan's life as a young woman in New York. It's true to the city, and offers some well executed cameo roles of gallery owners and Soho artistes, but it's just pleasant viewing after a while. The layers of supporting characters and incidental situations distract whatever attention the friendship might have drawn.

Girl Friends might have been a more successful project if Weill had been as true to life with her main characters as she is with her Manhattan settings and her bit parts. She loads the dice so heavily in Susan's favor that one wonders not only where the plot escaped to, but how one friend could be such a gem and the other such a turd. With all that's happening to Susan in her career and romantic life, it's not clear why she would feel such an acute sense of loss over friendship with Ann, or why that is supposedly the primary subject of the movie.

ALL OF THE VARIOUS subplots and minor characters converge at the opening of Susan's first exhibit. Her obnoxious lover makes up with the gift of a baby duck (she really does look like a duck), and even her parents come to the opening out of nowhere.

The only aspect not resolved is her relationship with Ann, which should have been the focus of the film in the first place. Ann can't make it to the opening. She had an abortion that morning--a pregnancy that grew out of insecurity and which, with a new sense of self-confidence, she decides to end alone. If this abortion really endears Susan to her friend again, there is some reason to doubt her humanity. Nonetheless, on the strengths of their individual accomplishments, Susan and Ann get drunk, giggle, and make up.

As a women's movie, Girl Friends breaks no new ground. The idea of exploring a friendship between women is potentially good, but Weill relies on conventional trappings of "liberation." The hyper-sensitivity of the two women in dealing with each other is cloying, their supportiveness towards each other is sincere but nothing new, and the last scene suggests that although their friendship is strong, it lacks judgement.

FOR AN INDEPENDENTLY produced film made on a shoestring budget, Girl Friends has a very professional look about it. The film has many touching and amusing moments, and it portrays life in Manhattan with realism and a smattering of humor. But verisimilitude does not a plot make, and Girl Friends suffers most from a one-dimensional story line, even if the line is quite nicely trimmed.