Kati’s Reviews > BFFs: The Radical Potential of Female Friendship > Status Update

She is entirely blindsided, then, when the unpleasant friction of reality intercedes, and when Sophie decided to move out. Here, in this abrupt shuffle, Baumbach and Gerwig lay bare the fear that perhaps lies at the heart of all intimacy: choosing someone who will not choose you back.

Drenched in the soft black-and-white of the French New Wave, their lives are profoundly cinematic, and profoundly romantic; which is, perhaps, the problem. To Frances, her life with Sophie has the halcyon quality of a movie that no outside world can touch - 'tell me the story of us, she asks childishly, tucked up in bed with Sophie, in love both with her friend and the fairy-tale they have made of their lives.

If I try very hard, I can almost pretend as if the years haven't passed, and the altered shop fronts and blocks of brand-new city haven't dissolved and reassembled before my eyes. Everything here reminds me of beginnings - the bewitching high of early adulthood when anything felt possible, when every person felt like a catalyst that might rewrite the intimacies of an entire life.

Almost every autumn, it seems, I find myself back in my old university city, engaged in a wary kind of negotiation with my own nostalgia. The season seems to have a different quality here; the light limpid and golden-bright, […]. I love it here desperately, but in a searching, spectral way, like a tourist passing through a place that no longer exists; relict standing stones from a disappeared past.

Blood may be thicker than water, but Sula and Nel's friendship becomes evidence of the long-forgotten fullness of this axiom: the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb, the ties that we choose stronger than the ones we are born into.

Love and attachment need somewhere to go, people to be poured into, a home to spread out and thrive. I think of Fleabag, heartbroken after her mother's funeral.
'I don't know what to do with it,' she sobs. 'With all the love I have for her. I don't know where to put it now.' I’ll take it, her best friend tells her.