Fwends – BFI London Film Festival Review
Em (Emmanuelle Mattana) is a young Sydney lawyer who’s just experienced harassment at work. She decides to spend the weekend with her old school friend Jessie (Melissa Gan) in Melbourne. The two wander around the city, catching up on all they’ve missed, and how they spend their days now. Though their lives have diverged, their decades-long bond is still very much intact.
The first thing you notice about Fwends – the debut feature from Australian director Sophie Somerville – is that the dialogue sounds like a disarmingly authentic representation of how young women talk to each other. This, in large part, is because that dialogue was improvised by actors Emmanuelle Mattana and Melissa Gan. And unusually for any movie, Fwends was shot in sequence, so the actor-improvisors were able to build the story as they moved along in the production process.
It’s easy to imagine such a process resulting in a movie that’s rambling and aimless, but with just a few exceptions (a sequence where Em gets high feels a little self-indulgent), Fwends is remarkably tight. Because the film is basically one long conversation – it plays out like a platonic, Gen Z, Aussie-set Before… movie – we get to feel the rhythms and resentments build in near-real time.
Em, high-strung and garrulous, barrels into the action a conversation bulldozer, talking at high speed about how much she works, and how much she likes it, and how she struggles to relax. Still reeling from what’s just happened to her, at first she’s almost manically self-centred, which leave the calmer, more laidback Jessie feeling increasingly put out.
While Em is one of those people who has known what they wanted to do since they were a child, Jessie has taken a more circuitous path through life, via various part time jobs that leave her space for having hobbies and little adventures. She’s recently split from her boyfriend, who took every fork from her apartment except one. Em doesn’t understand why Jessie hasn’t gotten round to getting more forks yet, Jessie doesn’t understand why Em is so obsessed with a job that is clearly making her miserable. The combination of their love for each other and their confusion at each other’s choices eventually boils over into an argument about the existential nature of reality.
That’s another thing Fwends does particularly well. Although Jessie and Em are both specific, well-drawn characters, they also serve as stand-ins for a generation thrown into a world that’s fallen apart at the seams, who’ve been told to go ahead and make the best of it (climate change is one of the most frequent topics of conversation). Once they’ve made it through to the other side of their initial argument, the two shed any remaining vestiges of fronts they were putting up for each other, and get really honest about their separate sadnesses, and the ways in which they survive the ordeal of being a person.
It’s a lovely, tender culmination to a movie that’s far more thoughtful than it first appears, as well as just being a really good hang.
★★★★
