Girl Friends

The heroine of Weill's chronicle of a woman in New York today - not pretty, not gamine, not even jolie laide - is an apprentice 'art' photographer, an uneasy heterosexual in a world of obsessively potato-mashing males, who is bereft when her poetry-writing flatmate marries and moves out. The slightly spaced gay dance freak who replaces her gets chucked (nice touch) when she borrows our heroine's blouse. But not before she catalyses the film's sidelong appraisal of lesbianism - treated, unusually, as a fair option. The net effect is a warm (if not entirely cosy) liberal feminism.