The surprising movie Stanley Kubrick called one of the “most interesting” of the 1970s
Such is the ongoing mystique of Stanley Kubrick, even the people closest to him have struggled to ascertain beyond reasonable doubt which movies ranked among his favourites. However, he held one film in such high regard that he couldn’t stop himself from repeatedly singing its praises.
While the filmmaker’s daughter and one of his long-time closest confidants couldn’t agree on the sci-fi features he genuinely liked, Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends is an entirely different story. It already held a place in the history books as the first independent film to be funded by grants, but Kubrick’s recommendation will have turned plenty of his fans onto its charms.
It took a while to reach the screen, though, with production rumbling on for almost three years after repeated funding issues, but Kubrick was instantly enamoured when Girlfriends finally secured a release in August 1978. In fact, he disregarded several larger questions on the current complexion of Hollywood to continually circle back around to its merits.
In a 1980 interview with Vicente Molina Foix, Kubrick was asked about the impact being made on American cinema by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, and Paul Schrader, only to ignore every single one of them and focus his attention on Girlfriends.
Calling it “one of the most interesting Hollywood films I’ve seen in a long time”, Kubrick glowingly described Weill’s feature debut as “one of the very rare American films that I would compare with the serious, intelligent, sensitive writing and filmmaking you find in the best directors of Europe”.
The simple – but deeply personal – tale of two women drifting apart when one of them moves out of their shared apartment to get married and inadvertently leaves the other stricken with loneliness was celebrated by Kubrick for the way in which “it seemed to make no compromise to the inner truth of the story”.
When the line of inquiry pivoted to his views on Hollywood at large, Kubrick again turned to Girlfriends for inspiration: “This film that Claudia Weill did, I think she did on an amateur basis; she shot it for about a year, two or three days a week,” he said. “Of course she had a great advantage, because she had all the time she needed to think about it, to see what she had done. I thought she made the film extremely well.”
Even when he was pressed on “underground cinema”, there was only one title on Kubrick’s mind. Even though he wouldn’t personally call Girlfriends an underground movie, presumably because he hadn’t “seen any underground films that I thought were important or particularly interesting,” he nonetheless lauded it as “just a low-budget professional film.”
It wasn’t underground; it wasn’t Hollywood, but it made a mark on the maestro.
