Girlfriends

A young woman living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and pursuing a career as a photographer, arrived on the screenright before cookie-cutter casting decimated the ranks of individualistic, nonconformist American actresses of the 1970s. Claudia Weill's discursive film about a young woman negotiating her independence from roommates and boyfriends is poised on the border between the gritty, grimy New York films of the 1970s and the pop indies of the 1980s, and Mayron is worlds away from the bland female leads who came to populate Hollywood rom-coms.