Word: mayron
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Dates: during 1978-1978
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Susan (Melanie Mayron) is a New York Jewish girl paying her dues as a photographer on the bar mitzvah and wedding circuit while waiting to hit the big-time. Her roommate and closest friend, Ann (played rather woodenly by Anita Skinner) is an aspiring poet who leaves Susan to get married. Susan painfully adjusts to living alone, her career advances sporadically, and after floundering awkwardly through two romantic attempts, she finally settles down comfortably in love...
WEILL'S APPARENT PURPOSE is to focus on the friendship of the two women, but she shifts to a study of Susan. While it is Mayron's performance which makes Susan such an attractive and humorous character, not all the problems with the character of Ann stem from Skinner's weak performance. Ann hovers in stereotypically suburban settings, seeming not only distant from Susan, but from the camera as well. One finds her cold and unsympathetic, and even the original friendship seems implausible at times...
...Mayron as Susan, on the other hand, simply charms the camera. She may not look as good as Jill Clayburgh in bikini panties and t-shirt, but she is by far the superior comic actress. Who else could convincingly pull off a brief affair with a 50-year-old rabbi? She's not only good with a funny line; she uses her extraordinarily expressive face and body, too, captivating Rabbi Gold (Eli Wallach), and the audience as well...
...lopsided presentation of the two roles of Susan and Ann gives Mayron more of the spotlight, but at the expense of an involving plot. Weill's documentary style uses everyday situations to reveal changes in the attitudes of the characters. Susan, however, holds the screen alone for so much of the film and so dominates it even when Ann appears that the film seems to be a celluloid diary of Susan's life as a young woman in New York. It's true to the city, and offers some well executed cameo roles of gallery owners and Soho artistes...
...picture gets in trouble very early. The opening scenes, meant to establish the title characters, are much too sketchy. Susan Weinblatt (Melanie Mayron) comes across as little more than a standard Upper West Side ugly duckling, like TV's Brenda Morgenstern: she is a sassy, overweight Jewish woman who is luckless with men and still struggling in her career as a photographer. Her roommate Anne Munroe (Anita Skinner) is an even more familiar type-a svelte, high-strung Wasp with ambitions to write poetry. When Anne leaves the nest to get married, her relationship with Susan starts to deteriorate...