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Blu-Ray : Highly Recommended
Ranking:
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Release Date: November 10th, 2020 Movie Release Year: 1978

Girlfriends - The Criterion Collection

Overview -

Blu-ray Review By: Billy Russell
Claudia Weill’s underseen, quiet dramedy from 1978, Girlfriends, tells the story of two young women in New York, coming of age in a time of uncertainty.  As they navigate their lives, with love, work and growing up, they find themselves growing apart from each other. The Blu-ray from Criterion looks and sounds like a relic of its era-specific time, in a place that no longer exists, other than the movies. The film itself is fantastic, with a slew of excellent special features to dive into, and Criterion’s release of it comes Highly Recommended  

OVERALL:
Highly Recommended
Rating Breakdown
STORY
VIDEO
AUDIO
SPECIAL FEATURES
Tech Specs & Release Details
Technical Specs:
Blu-ray Disc
Video Resolution/Codec:
1080p AVC/MPEG-4
Length:
88
Aspect Ratio(s):
1.66:1
Audio Formats:
English: LPCM Mono
Subtitles/Captions:
English SDH
Release Date:
November 10th, 2020

Storyline: Our Reviewer's Take

Ranking:

Movies set in late ‘70s and early ‘80s New York City are my weakness. I have a fondness for the drab, urban decay and the various people who navigate it, trying to cut out their own piece of life in this neverending city, stretching out, and high, as the eye can see. While Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends is more of the Woody Allen variety than of Martin Scorsese, Weill’s background in documentary filmmaking brings a naturalism to the performances and dialogue that makes me think of it as a kinder, gentler Mean Streets–although these streets aren’t without their complications.

Susan Weinblatt (Melanie Mayron) is a struggling photographer living with her good friend and roommate Anne (Anita Skinner). Susan mostly photographs bar mitzvahs and weddings, but her “big break” (a couple of hundred bucks to help keep the electricity on) comes when she sells some of her photos to a magazine. Anne has her own exciting adventure on the way: she’s getting married, and quick. Anne moves out and Susan finds herself without her best friend, living on her own, as nothing goes her way. The magazine sale that should have been her big break isn’t the amazing opportunity she thought it was, her love life is complicated, and she and Anne grow further and further apart each passing day.

Girlfriends couldn’t be further away from my own experience growing up. Susan Weinblatt is a Jewish woman living in NYC, struggling to find legitimacy as an artist. I grew up as a Catholic boy in a small, desert town with a population of about 7,000. But the empathetic power of film is that Susan’s story is incredibly relatable because the struggle is a universal experience: Making that first step toward adulthood in your early 20s and all the failures and complications that come with it.  It’s a fantastic film, with a real lived-in quality that doesn’t feel derivative slog to power through.  It’s endlessly watchable, with fantastic performances (including early roles from Christopher Guest and Bob Balaban). Girlfriends is among the best NYC slice-of-life films from the era, earning a deserved recognition amongst other titans of the time like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Sydney Lumet. It’s not populated with violence or urban decay, but it’s just as real.




Vital Disc Stats: The Blu-ray
Criterion’s Blu-ray release of Girlfriends is presented on a single disc sourced from a restored 4K digital transfer supervised by director Claudia Weill and supervised by the film’s cinematographer, Fred Murphy. The film is pretended here in its original monaural soundtrack format, remastered for this release.  Inside the packaging is a booklet containing two essays, one by Molly Haskell and the other by In a Different Voice author Carol Gilligan.

Video Review

Ranking:

Girlfriends has been restored in 4K from its original film negative for this 1080p Blu-ray release.  The film was made in the 1970s, on 16mm, for a budget of about $500,000.  It looks rough around the edges, but that’s how it should look. For the purpose of accurately assessing the video quality, I viewed the film on both a 65” 4K television and 49” television standard high-def television. The results were nearly identical, which is that the transfer itself is as good as it could possibly be, but due to the nature of filming at the time, on equipment the crew had at hand, the picture is frequently soft, and slightly out of focus in wider shots, or master shots. Close-ups are generally crystal clear and sharp, allowing fine details to be noticeable. Establishing shots of the city are gorgeous and contain deep, natural shadows. Colors pop appropriately, particularly reds and other primary colors, or hues found on characters’ skin. The fact is, rough as it is, Girlfriends looks the way it’s supposed to, which is a grainy, naturalistic, low-budget film from the 1970s.  It looks as good as it is supposed to retaining its natural charm and aesthetic. 

Audio Review

Ranking:

Girlfriends is presented in its original monaural soundtrack–there is no fancy newly-commissioned 5.1 mix here, but that’s fine because the existing mix is essential to its overall charm. Keep in mind, I’m grading on a curve here - this isn’t Star Wars!  But for a single-audio-channel soundtrack, it’s surprisingly robust and well-mixed. It was remastered for this release using Avid’s ProTools and iZotope RX, according to the booklet that accompanies the disc. Because the soundtrack is in mono, this will solely be a front-speaker presentation. However, there is a surprising amount of ambient sound, from traffic noise of the city, the muffled barking of dogs a few apartments over, or the buzzing chitchat of an art gallery opening. Dialogue is always favored and never gets lost, shining through with power and strength.

Due to the nature of recording at the time, dialogue can sound a little flat, but always emphasized so it’s clear and precise in the overall soundstage. When watching the special features, with dialogue recorded later, it felt fuller, and some of the lower pitches could be felt through the subwoofer. The main film presentation itself had no such depth, through no fault of the transfer, it was simply honoring the existing master. Like the rough-around-the-edges video transfer, the audio presentation is an accurate representation of the film, and while it’s not as rich and robust as one would like, it’s perfect for setting out what it intends to do.

Special Features

Ranking:

Criterion has loaded Girlfriends with an excellent variety of new special features, created specifically for this release. First is the usual booklet found within the packaging, with two essays, One by Molly Haskell and the other by Carol Gilligan. Both essays dive deep into the film’s themes, with expertly written pieces that should be a wonderful read for fans or casual enthusiasts with an interest in film theory. 

  • Interview with Director Claudia Weill (HD 26:46) Weill discusses how she came upon filmmaking as a profession and how she came to direct Girlfriends.  She shares stories about the film’s production as a young, struggling auteur.
  • Interview with Screenwriter Vicki Polon (HD 12:33) Here Polon discusses the process of writing Girlfriends, and how, oddly enough, how much of her life did not influence the story; rather, stories she knew from friends and freely pilfered for the purpose of the screenplay.  She breaks down the story beats and the decisions that went into deciding to eschew traditional, predictable storytelling norms.
  • Girlfriends: A Look Back (HD 16:01) Director Claudia Weill, and actors Melanie Mayron, Christopher Guest and Bob Balaban swap stories about the film’s production.  While Balaban had already been in instant-classic like Midnight Cowboy and Close Encounters, this still represented an early work for them.  
  • Claudia Weill and Joey Soloway (HD 22:14) Claudia Weill sits down to a virtual interview conducted by Joey Soloway (Transparent) and the two of them discuss filmmaking, storytelling, being a woman and balancing expectations of making a movie, while being true to reality.  
  • City Lights (SD 19:50) - An interview with Claudia Weill and Melanie Mayron for Canadian television, originally conducted at the time of the film’s release in 1978.
  • The disc also contains two short films:
    • Joyce at 34 (HD 27:49) a 1971 documentary by Joyce Chopra and Claudia Weill 
    • Commuters (HD 3:42) a 1970 short documentary made by Weill and Eliot Noyes.

Girlfriends is a great coming-of-age slice of life in a specific time and place, both romanticized and villainized by films of the era. It’s a nostalgic look at being young, being foolish, making mistakes and outgrowing your previous life and friends. Though the film’s video and audio presentations are not going to ooh-and-ah most viewers, they remain accurate to the film as completed at the time of its release, and its low budget scrappiness. The film itself is fantastic, with a slew of excellent special features to dive into, and Criterion’s release of it comes Highly Recommended for the work that went into restoring it for a new generation of film enthusiasts.