The endur­ing lega­cy of Clau­dia Weill’s Girlfriends

One of the great cin­e­mat­ic injus­tices of the late 20^th cen­tu­ry is that while Woody Allen’s name became syn­ony­mous with the neu­rot­ic artist liv­ing in New York City, Clau­dia Weill and her debut fea­ture Girl­friends was large­ly for­got­ten. Long before Girls In The Big City became a com­mon trope, via the films of Nora Ephron to Sex and the City and Lena Dunham’s Girls, Girl­friends was one of the first films to cap­ture the nuances and com­plex­i­ties of female friend­ship and the fright­en­ing lone­li­ness of freedom.

Girl­friends is a love sto­ry about two flat­mates: the strug­gling pho­tog­ra­ph­er Susan (Melanie May­ron) and her best friend, the would-be poet Anne (Ani­ta Skin­ner). Their sym­bi­ot­ic way of life is cut short when Anne tells her flat­mate that she’s get­ting mar­ried, mov­ing out of the apart­ment, and start­ing a new life with her hus­band. The rest of the film is about their break-up, as Susan strug­gles with her emerg­ing career and a new flat­mate and has mean­ing­less flings with men, all while miss­ing her best friend. Mean­while, Anne dis­cov­ers domes­tic bliss isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and strug­gles to play the parts of wife and moth­er while her pas­sion for writ­ing is con­tin­u­al­ly pushed to the side by fam­i­ly life.

The two women’s nar­ra­tives – career women and house­wife – rep­re­sent post-six­ties wom­an­hood. While sec­ond wave fem­i­nism meant that more women were seek­ing inde­pen­dence and careers in the city, they were still expect­ed to set­tle down once they mar­ried. Caught between the two only avail­able choic­es and nar­ra­tives, Susan and Anne dis­cov­er they don’t fit either.

Best friends liv­ing in the big city has become a well-worn cliché. While crit­ics hailed Dunham’s Girls as a fem­i­nist remod­el­ling of Sex and the City, real­ly is a third-wave, mil­len­ni­al younger sis­ter to Weill’s film. Speak­ing about Girl­friends’ influ­ence, Dun­ham said it, ​“feels like my old­est influ­ence, yet I saw it for the first time less than a year ago […] from the first shot, I was trans­fixed. By the com­plex rela­tion­ships, the sub­tle­ty, the odd com­e­dy that was awk­ward long before awk­ward was cool.” Dun­ham was so inspired that Weill end­ed up direct­ing an episode of Girls in 2013, her first direct­ing job since 2001.

Sim­i­lar­ly, Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha – a film that feels more like it belongs more to its co-screen­writer and star Gre­ta Ger­wig than it does to Baum­bach – takes direct inspi­ra­tion from Weill. Frances Ha is also about two co-habit­u­at­ing best friends, Frances (Ger­wig) and Sophie (Mick­ey Sum­n­er) who share every­thing, from beds to cig­a­rettes. After Sophie moves out to live in Japan with her boyfriend, Frances is left alone, float­ing from place to place while her life spi­rals out of con­trol. Vignette scenes echo Girl­friends as Frances attempts to bring her cre­ative career as a dancer to fruition while min­gling with hip­sters at par­ties in Manhattan.

In the film’s piv­otal scene, Frances describes the one moment that she wants more than any­thing: ​“It’s that thing when you’re with some­one and you love them and they know it and they love you and you know it but it’s a par­ty and you’re both talk­ing to oth­er peo­ple and you’re laugh­ing and shin­ing. You look across the room and catch each oth­ers eyes […] because that is your per­son in this life, and it’s fun­ny and sad. That secret world that exists right there in pub­lic, unno­ticed, that no one else knows is there.” At the end of the film, Frances gets her moment as she looks across at Sophie and catch­es her eye.

At the end of Girl­friends, the secret world of best friends is cap­tured in a sim­i­lar man­ner. After Anne doesn’t show up to Susan’s exhibition’s open­ing, Susan goes to the coun­try cot­tage that Anne has run away to. The two rec­on­cile from an ear­li­er fight in which Susan blamed Anne for leav­ing her. ​“I’m afraid of being left,” Susan con­fides to Anne, ​“I’m the biggest tur­tle I know.” The ter­ror that comes from inde­pen­dence and the abil­i­ty to choose your own nar­ra­tive looms over both the women: Susan’s life alone in the city and Anne’s choice to have an abor­tion ear­li­er that day.

As the friends drink tequi­la togeth­er and sit beside the fire, Anne’s hus­band pulls up in the dri­ve­way. Susan and Anne share a look before Anne leaves to greet her hus­band. It’s a look that cap­tures an entire world that the women have cre­at­ed togeth­er, that Anne’s hus­band and the audi­ence isn’t privy to. They’re each oth­ers’ person.

Girl­friends was rad­i­cal when it was released in 1978 and remains so 40 years on. A female direc­tor mak­ing a film about two women and their choic­es, careers, and fears as well as tack­ling issues like abor­tion, sex­u­al harass­ment, and casu­al flings isn’t a com­mon occur­rence even by today’s stan­dards. Weill pio­neered an entire sub­genre of inde­pen­dent women in the city and Girl­friends is an over­looked classic.