Not in Hollywood they don’t. But two charming new independent films, both first features by female directors that premired at Sundance, show girl bonding as the messy, complex experience it really is. Nicole Holofcener’s Walking and Talking tells of two thirtyish friends who get thrown for a loop when one decides to get married. Chronically single Amelia (Catherine Keener) panics when she stares down a lonely life of video-store rentals and chemotherapy sessions for her cat. Chronic flirt Laura (Anne Heche, one of Sundance’s predicted stars-to-be) panics after she accepts a ring from her wacky boyfriend Frank (Todd Field). Suddenly she’s obsessed with Frank’s every flaw; meanwhile Amelia has been driven to date her geeky video clerk (Kevin Corrigan, humane and winning as “the ugly guy”). For the first time in their lives, Laura and Amelia can’t relate. Holofcener has a wonderful breezy touch; she lets the friends squabble and miscommunicate in painfully true-to-life ways. She hides life issues in such sweet moments, you barely notice them as they go down.
In Lisa Krueger’s Manny & Lo, growing up is even harder. Eleven-year-old Manny (Scarlett Johansson) and her 16-year-old sister, Lo (Aleska Palladino), are foster-home runaways with a punk-rock edge: Lo’s hair is badly bleached, and Manny wears blue nail polish and dime-store plastic rings. When Lo belatedly figures out she’s pregnant, they hole up in an empty summer house and kidnap a children’s-store clerk (Mary Kay Place) as a surrogate parent. In her starched nurse’s uniform, shuffling around with a bicycle chain for leg irons, Place would steal the movie if the youngsters weren’t so impossibly perfect. Both Johansson and Palladino have a haunting combination of kidness and premature adulthood: in one scene they’re licking lollipops, in the next Lo’s stomping out of an abortion clinic in her dressing gown. Krueger, who’s worked with indie hipsters Jim Jarmusch and Abel Ferrara, knows a great deal about resonant details–Manny’s always looking at the world through the distorted lens of a magnifying glass. Krueger and Holofcener show us that the closer we look at female relationships, the more unexpected nuances we discover.
