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ME WITHOUT YOU

What would happen if Bridget Jones had an evil twin who overcame all her perceived inadequacies but was still unhappy? Sandra Goldbacher’s flip and prickly chronicle of some 25 years in a friendship between two London women offers fewer cheap laughs but more insight than last year’s hit adaptation of the Helen Fielding bestseller.

Dawson’s Creek star Michelle Williams takes up the Renée Zellweger role as Holly, the plain but brainy Jewish girl in thrall to her glamorous next-door neighbor, Marina (Anna Friel), whose parents are fashionably (for 1974) dissipated and adulterous. As the years pass (the evanescence and accumulation of detail is one of the film’s strengths), Marina leads and Holly follows through such passing, cutting-edge fads as punk rock and deconstruction (Kyle MacLachlan has the Hugh Grant role as a sleazy literature professor). Holly’s idolization of her friend is matched by her deepening crush on Marina’s equally confused brother, Nat (Oliver Milburn). Holly never gets what she wants or fulfills her potential, whereas Marina breezes through life’s achievements; only when Marina converts to Judaism does it becomes clear that she’s the parasite and that her emptiness is more aching than Holly’s need. Both an acerbic glimpse at the follies and infatuations of the past three decades and a knowing look at the largely unexplored world of female bonding, Goldbacher’s film loses focus only when it strains for a glib resolution. (107 minutes)

BY PETER KEOUGH

Issue Date: August 22 - 29, 2002
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