An early entry in the single-women-in-the-big-city genre that would flourish in the wake of 1970s feminism, Girlfriends stars a very funny Melanie Mayron as Susan Weinblatt, an aspiring photographer in New York City who lives with her best friend Anne (Anita Skinner). When Anne gets married, Susan enters a season of rotating roommates and unsteady paramours (the latter include Eli Wallach as a rabbi and a young Christopher Guest). Claudia Weill directs a screenplay by Vicki Polon, and while it’s a pretty scruffy production overall, there are occasional visual grace notes. (I especially like the moment when Mayron and Guest test out an indoor hammock as a metaphor for their relationship.) For Girlfriends’ French counterpart (both films employ photography as a crucial, recurring motif), check out Agnes Varda’s One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, another intimate portrait of what it was like to be a woman pushing back against convention in the late 1970s.
