Hallelujah!

[oursin]

Have just been to see The Edge of Love: and it's not a film about Dylan Thomas and hyz wynmmynz - it's about the friendship between Caitlin (DT's wife) and Vera (his first girlfriend from adolescence, remet during the Blitz).

And Caitlin and Vera are young married women with small children! And there is story! (admittedly the story is driven by the menfolk, but as it impacts the women.)

(Okay, there were a few films about female friendship in the 1970s - one of them was Julia, which, whatever Hellman's veracity in the original narrative, is a damn fine story about female friends - and I discover that Diane Kurys' Coupe de Foudre, which also had young mothers bonding as friends, was actually 1983 - but it's not exactly a common theme.)

It does, true, have that episode which I could make a case is definitely a narrative trope for devoted friendship between heterosexual women, which is where one assists the other in procuring an abortion (but this may have actually happened, since film is based on fact?).

But otherwise, yay!

Also, I now want the director and scriptwriter to make a movie about Laura Riding and Robert Graves! Because that would be really cool too.

Comments

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Because of course when film-makers depict heterosexual relationships, they always show the way it develops, as opposed to the lovers walking hand in hand on the beach and splashing each other in the waves, etc....

There were some rather tricksy artsty-wartsy bits in the direction, and possibly some undue concealment of certain things in order to explode them as 'surprise revelation'; plus perhaps a bit too much loving-recreation-of-period-detail in parts, but on the whole I thought it worked.