19.

A

FILM

REVIEW

Girl Friends by Claudia Weill

Everyone seems to like Claudia Weill's new film, Girl Friends. Many reviewers have waxed ecstatic about it. Finally, they say, here is a real "women's film", not just a Hollywood approximation. Here is a film directed, produced and written by women, a film which focuses on the relationships and personal development of young women, a film that even has a substantially female crew. Audiences, both female and male, agree with the reviewers' enthusiasm, and it looks as if the movie will be a modest but solid success.

Girl Friends began in 1975 as a half-hour short, funded by the American Film Institute and, as additional resources were found, was expanded to feature length. Weill had been a documentary filmmaker, whose credits included Joyce at 34, a short made with Joyce Chopra about the difficulties of balancing motherhood and career, and, with Shirley MacLaine, The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir. Girl Friextits was her first dramatic film, based on a story she were lach Vicki Polon turned into a script. Eventually, Warner Brothers agreed to distribute the movie and signed Weill to direct two more films for

film is good. It's about two roommates, New York Jewish Susan Weinblatt (Melanie Mayron) and blonde, midwestern Anne Munroe (Anita Skinner). Susan is an aspiring photographer; she scrapes for a living taking pictures of weddings and bar mitzvahs for Rabbi Gold, played by Eli Wallach. Anne wants to be a writer. Anne weakens under the doubts and difficulties of trying to make it as a poet: **I don't want to take care of myself-I want him to take care of me." Marriage inevitably follows, and Anne leaves Susan alone in their apartment feeling lonely and hurt.

From this point, the film really focuses on Susan's struggles to become a photographer, to combat loneliness, to develop and mature. The struggles are convincing and touching, thanks to Vicki Polon's script, Weill's directing, and a remarkable acting job by Melanie Mayron. Mayron is supported by an excellent cast of women and men-some of whose roles are little more than cameos. The women include Julie (Gina Rejak), an ambitious, divorced professional photographer, Beatrice (Viveca Lindfors), a hardheaded but sympathetic gallery owner who gives Susan her first show, and Ceil (Amy Wright), a spacey dancer who lives with Susan for a while. All the women like each other-for example, though Julie and Susan are in a competitive business, they support each other both professionally and personally; Susan helps Julie get an exhibition; Julie soothes Susan after she fights with her lover Eric. All of the women are dealing in various ways with surviving and developing in a man's world, and there is a sense of wry awareness in their relationships with each other.

The men are less central but are also assets to the. film. Eli Wallach is poignant as Rabbi Gold whose affection for Susan has to be cooled off when it clashes with family roles and responsibilities. His excellent performance never misses. Bob Balaban as Martin, Anne's husband, and Christopher Guest as Eric, who becomes Susan's lover, give good performances too-Weill; skillfully keeps them from becoming male stereotypes. (Individual nasty men aren't the ultimate problem for women; it's a sexist society that makes it hard to cope.)

While Susan struggles with the problems of living alone and establishing herself professionally, Anne fights to combine writing with wife-and-motherhood. She envies Susan her independence, her lover, her show; Susan envies Anne her security and resents relating to Anne "only when Martin is busy". It's hard to stay girlfriends in a male and family-centered society, and out of their frustration, the two women fight. "I felt you betrayed me," says Susan. “I think you're selfish," grates Anne.

Page 6/What She Wants/Jamtary,* 1979-

The night of Susan's photography show opening, Anne doesn't show up, and Susan drives to the country to find her. Anne has secretly gotten an abortion because she knows another child will mean the end of her writing, and she doesn't want her husband to talk her out of ending her pregnancy, The two women talk, drink together, realize their mixed strengths and weaknesses, reaffirm their friendship. The film ends ambiguously: as Martin's car comes up the drive, Anne giggles at Susan and goes to answer the door. Susan smiles, and the camera freezes on her wistful, slightly rueful face.

Yes, it's a very good film, but, one which doesn't quite make good on its promises, for me, at least. Girl Friends isn't primarily about friendship between women. Its title should be closer to Portrait of Susan as a Young Artist. For me, the beginning sequences of the film don't establish the depth of the young women's friendship adequately enough to make it seem important or to provide a focus for the rest of the story. Anita Skinner is just not so good an actor as Mayron, who tends to eclipse her. And after the first sequences, Weill clearly subordinates investigating Anne's life and character to exploring Susan's. Because its central friendship was more vividly realized, Julia moved me more deeply than Girl Friends does.

I missed too a sense of group consciousness or cooperation among women. Girl Friends, although it's an extremely sympathetic women's film, is not, in this sense, feminist film. There is no feeling of a collective feminist fight to change the conditions of women's lives-the struggle to "make it" is essentially individual. Friendships among women are important (and how many films admit that?), but they are not completely to be relied on. As Weill told one interviewer, "Friendship is a fragile, potentially painful phenomenon and I think that by the end of the film, the main character, Susan, has come to realize that." This seems to be the meaning of her wistful expression in the final freeze frame.

Because Girl Friends gives a basically static picture of society with no hint of a movement for

cpf

change-even though it does show individual women gaining in strength-it is not threatening to the more conservative. As the Los Angeles Times reviewer points out, "Girl Friends is nothing like a militant tract; it is a compassionate portrait of women...."

"Compassionate portraits are always more popular than militance, particularly among the influential, and in a business in which even a shoestring production like Girl Friends costs $500,000 to make, that fact is vital.

Mind you, I'm glad the film was made. There should be more like it, and I look forward eagerly to see what Claudia Weill will make next at Warner Brothers. My complaint is not that there are too many compassionate portraits of women in commercial film but that "militant tracts" are virtually nonexistent.

Empress Stops and Changes Gears

The Cleveland Heights Board of Zoning has directed EmPress to cease its printing operation at 2420 South Taylor Road as of December 20th. By April 1st, we will have to remove all of our equipment from the "White House". During this time,

EmPress will be making decisions on the following:

1. Our future direction, whereby we could become: (a) a non-profit organization offering graphic arts training to interested women and publishing women's art and literature; (b) a for-

CPF

-Carolyn Platt

profit business operating as a regular business, as well as remaining sensitive to the special needs of women's organizations and organizations supportive of women;

2. The best ways to accomplish the above;

3. How we may avoid some of the errors and problems of the past eighteen months; and

4. Achieving financial solvency in order to support our present and future staff and to assist the rest of our community.

In the interim, we will continue to offer a full graphic arts service to the women's organizations who have supported EmPress from our birth. We are able to do our own pre press and will contract out printing to quality printers who can offer both a competitive price and quality service.

We are interested in any ideas for our future, as well as honest feedback concerning our past operation. Please send them to:

EmPress, inc.

P.O. Box 18208

Cleveland Hts., OH 44118 Please no phone calls.

Thank you very much for all your past support, encouragement, and, in many cases, patience. We will let you know through WSW of our future plans. Point of interest-In November, 1978 EmPress became the first women owned and operated union printer in Cleveland!

The Staff of EmPress