Dec 17, 2020 Web Exclusive By Stephen Danay
One of the pleasures of digging into older films is discovering movies that you’re not familiar with that are clear influences on films you love.
Girlfriends, Claudia Weill’s 1978 indie about a twenty-something Jewish woman navigating professional, personal and romantic hurdles in New York City, is a clear antecedent to so much of the slice-of-life mumblecore that has dominated the indie scene of the last decade and a half. The film most indebted to it though, is the Noah Baumbach/Greta Gerwig 2012 collaboration
Frances Ha, which borrows the preoccupations and structure of
Girlfriends and updates it for a millennial audience.