Girlfriends

Part of the special series FEMINIST FRAMES

After the film, curator Julia Pühringer talks with dramaturge, author, director, and actress Kathrin Resetarits about screenplay structures and narrative forms: How can films be constructed so that different stories and new perspectives become possible?

A wedding is not a happy ending: The young photographer Susan Weinblatt (Melanie Mayron) shares an apartment with her best friend Anne Munroe (Anita Skinner), a young writer, in late-1970s New York. Susan photographs weddings, babies, bar mitzvahs, and dreams of having her work shown in a real gallery. She has a crush on an older rabbi (a casting coup: Eli Wallach). When Anne announces her upcoming wedding, it’s a major blow for Susan: she not only loses her best friend, but must now also finance the New York apartment on her own. Susan gets her first solo exhibition — and through this, Anne realizes how much she misses her own independence; she now has a small child, and her husband does not support her professional ambitions. And yet this film has a happy ending — just not a wedding.

A film like a best friend:
“I wanted to see somebody like me in the movies,” Claudia Weill once said. She wanted to make a film about the sidekick in romantic comedies — the girl who is friends with the protagonist who gets married at the end, the one who has her own life, is often funny, often unconventional, not as pretty, sometimes Jewish, sometimes not white. The result is a coming-of-age film of the kind we usually only knew with struggling young men as the leads — here, women smoke at the bar and negotiate nothing less than their future, during that phase of life when you have no real idea where you’re headed, even though you’re already in the middle of it.