how should a person be🕯️🍁
#Scurf206: Walking and Talking (1996) & Girlfriends (1978) - these movies, predecessors to 2012's Frances Ha, teach us a valuable something about being somewhere in the middle
Like any self-respecting twenty-something in the last decade, I watched Greta Gerwig’s Frances Ha (2012) a couple years too late and almost immediately fell in love with it. It set me off to watching many more of Gerwig’s movies and just admire, soak in and enjoy the milieus she had created in them as an actor. She was this awkward, clumsy, unfinished version of herself in some of these titles, giving me some kind of emotional support in my late-twenties. Some of these are: Nights and Weekends, 20th Century Women, Greenberg and Maggie’s Plan. But Frances Ha always sticks out for its genuine warmth, for the place-finding, person searching, wandering spirit at the heart of it.
Earlier this week, thanks to Amelia Dimoldenberg’s movie picks at the Criterion Closet, I found out about this movie called Girlfriends (1978), which was one of the inspirations for Baumbach’s Frances.
I found the film online and dug right in! Girlfriends (1978) is a movie about two close female friends who are living together and have found a new flat when one of them tells the other that she is going to get married. Right off the bat, the frames of the film pulled me in. It had that very comfortable, lived in, grainy feel where we see our protagonist, Susan Weinblatt, go through the motions of losing a friend to marriage, finding her base as a photographer and finally, putting her inhibitions aside and sorta kinda falling in love with a guy.
The movie gives a peek into the inner worlds of these two women from the time, who are both artistically-inclined but of disparate dispositions. While Weinblatt wants to continue sharing an apartment with her close friend Anne, the later wants to go off on a diametrically opposite tangent. Anne pines for marital conjugation and perhaps even looks forward to becoming a mother.
This sets Susan off on a trajectory of her own making and unmaking. She loses temporary jobs, falls for a much older man, gets a houseguest who refuses to leave, stands up for herself and finally, gets her own photo exhibition.
While at the start of the story Anne betrays signs of being a writer, the way she shapes her life, it becomes clearer that she perhaps wants a bit of both. As Susan gets her show, some movement in her career, Anne feels insecure and acts out. The friends fight and make up soon after, but every bit of these episodes is shown in a documentary-like fashion, making the characters even more endearing.
Around the time it released, Stanley Kubrick called Girlfriends one of the most exciting American movies of its era. That holds true even now when its grainy, washed out print made me sit in a dark room with a scented candle lit in the distance and immerse myself in their world. Director Claudia Weill in an interview to Criterion many years later says for this film she “made the story rather than finding it”.
“In documentary the script is the last thing,” she said. Weill wanted to start with a story, figuring out along the way how to tell it rather than discovering the story in the process of shooting and editing. She wanted to make the girl who does not get married immediately the protagonist for this movie and it comes through so beautifully. The details that crystallise and gather for us onscreen in the ways of Susan’s worries, dreams, past are witness to that reverse documentary process that Weill speaks of. We see onscreen, a person make themselves into who they are.
When I googled similar movies, YouTube showed Catherine Keener’s 1996 title Walking and Talking. And after watching it, it felt like the befitting successor to Girlfriends. These are movies, I now realise, that could be clubbed into the genre very inappropriately called “mumblecore”, gelling well in the same shelf as Friends With Money (2006), This Closeness (2023) and some others.
🌀 Walking and Talking is again a film about these very comfortably familiar set of strangers who go about their onscreen lives with so much grace. I found Keener’s Amelia so charming in her confusions, frustrations and affections. She loves her best friend, but also perhaps doesn’t want to lose her to marriage. She’s awkward, scrawny and a little bit of a foul-mouth. As she watches the water of her life flow, she realises that sometimes she just has to let go. She calls a guy “ugly” but ends up being infatuated with him.
The two friends love each other but not unconditionally. They snap at each other, they confront and also actively flag things they don’t like about one another. But they are also hopelessly in love with each other, unable to cope without the other. They go through life’s simple humiliations and still figure out a path for themselves. It’s not as if they become superstars or millionaires at the end of it, but they certainly are closer to a version of themself that they’d have wanted to be when the story begins. A better shaped, more experienced and slightly more well-nuanced versions of their former selves.
Walking and Talking felt like a solo date movie, you watch cozying up in bed alone as the morning comes up outside. It is the everydayness of life both these movies capture so properly, giving them the dignity that we often deny. Moments of small intimacies by the washing machine, while cooking for one in the kitchen with your best friend watching over, while taking a walk to the nearest video store with your ex are what make up some of our most fulfilling yet banal life experiences. And these films aim just to frame those.
Sometimes just looking, recording, being is enough. And both Walking and Talking and Girlfriends do the ample, important job of holding those private embarrassments in the form of diary entries that you flip over years later and smile to yourself about. The nothingness of everyday, when woven together on the page or on screen results in a beauty that is this simple, yet profound!
