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.