Spanish Film Festival Film Review: Girlfriends
Images courtesy of the Spanish Film Festival.
Taking an L is hard. It doesn’t help when the L’s don’t stop rolling in, and when you lose your job, your friends, your confidence and your home in a matter of days it starts to feel like any kind of recovery is out of reach. So, what is one to do when the sky starts falling and your life seems over? Follow Marta’s lead and regress into your childhood and re-link with that old friend group who you remember having so much fun with.
In this decision to return to square one, Girlfriends ponders privilege, perseverance, and the pressures of individuality in the life of a 27-year-old with nothing to show for striking out on her own in the big smoke. It’s that perfect, over-achiever fairy-tale that we’ve seen in entrepreneurial legends and big screen biopics; a perfect specimen pushes themselves to the limit and they become Margaret Thatcher, Serena Williams, or, lately, Elon Musk. Marta’s story is a little more conventional - she came from a country town in Spain to try her luck with the artists in the city, but when her photojournalism career tanks while her friend’s modelling soars, it is the ultimate bit of cringe to see the girl who risked it all fail, while the girl born into luxury floats effortlessly.
Upon returning to her hometown, Marta is a glammed-up city chick, waltzing with attitude and purpose, both of which face bouts with blunt force trauma as Girlfriends works to get to the bottom of what exactly success is. Is it marked by happiness or accolades?
“Where are you going, Batman?” two boys ask Marta at the bus stop as she smoulders past in the beginning of the movie. Marta’s style slowly regresses to childish as living with parents, job searching and drinking all day lowers the burdensome expectations while unappealing character traits are confronted by friends and family alike. Maturity is a process not mastered naturally, which is the key driver for Girlfriend’s narrative in the second half where miracle solutions are not found, and passions are fleeting.
There was a key moment in Girlfriends where I was taken back to Spider-Man 2, as Peter struggled with the evaporation of his powers only to find that internal discontent was leading to his lacklustre performance. This is a classic ‘fall-from-grace’ storyline, but audiences might find it easier to project themselves onto a young fashion-photographer from Spain, rather than a web-slinging action-photographer from New York.
Girlfriends is screening at the Spanish Film Festival in Melbourne between the 21st April and 15th May 2022. For tickets and more info, click here.