"Antonia and Jane" Reviewed by Linda Lopez McAlister For The Women's Show, WMNF-FM, Tampa, FL It is a special season when we have two films on the theme of women's friendship to review back to back. Two weeks ago it was "Fried Green Tomatoes" and today it's "Antonia and Jane," a British import that opened last night at the Tampa Theater. "Antonia and Jane" was written by a woman, Marcy Kahan, and directed by a woman, Beeban Kidron, whose earlier films include "Carry Greenham Home" (1983) about the women of the feminist peace encampment at Greenham Common and "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit" which has been acclaimed at a number of gay and lesbian film festivals in recent years. That film and "Antonia and Jane" were both originally produced for television in Britain, the former as a three part serialization and the "Antonia and Jane" as a one shot, hour long drama. The film doesn't seem nearly as sparse and lacking in production values as U.S. made for t.v. films do, but it still feels like a "small film" to me. It's a very skillfully crafted and enjoyable short comedy about two women and the progress of their friendship from childhood to their late 30s. Antonia and Jane have grown up with one another and have been "friends" all their lives, but their friendship epitomizes all the patriarchal cliches about how women can't be friends: they are catty, back-stabbing, envious of one another, competitive, and Antonia even steals and marries Jane's husband. Still they continue to get together for dinner once a year. As they mature each one thinks that the other one has the better life; Jane is jealous of Antonia's marriage, children, glamorous clothes and lifestyle as a literary agent, etc. Meanwhile, Antonia, despite the front she puts on when she meets Jane for their yearly dinner reunion, secretly envies Jane's freedom, her adventurousness, her intellect, etc. We as the audience get to see each of the women through their own eyes in their weekly therapy sessions, and through the other woman's eyes. (Unbeknownst to one another they share the same therapist). The filmmakers are extremely skillful in subtly altering the way the characters look depending on whose eyes we are seeing them through at any given time, and in a couple of sequences even project the characters into schlock tv programs and a 1940's Nazi espionage film--revealing not only more about the ways Antonia and Jane feel about their relationship, but Kidron's virtuosity as a filmmaker as well. The film is very funny and deftly dissects the ways women are supposed to act and feel toward one another. The therapist keeps asking each of them why they continue to meet once a year if they dislike one another so much. They are never really able to articulate the answer to that question until the end of the film when, with both of their lives in total disarray, they meet without their pretenses and defenses and, finally, connect with the underlying love they have for one another. My problem with the film is that I got impatient seeing these interesting and likeable women being rotten to each other, no matter how wittily it is done. I'd really rather see what happens after the film ends, when Antonia and Jane begin to be the kind of friends women can be for one another once we finally stop listening to the tapes in our head that tell us we can't trust and love one another. Still, it's clear from the final sequence that Antonia and Jane do reach that point and that fact alone makes "Antonia and Jane" noteworthy in the annals of film: happily ever after here doesn't mean being coupled with the appropriate male in the final reel, it means discovering how much your friendship with this woman whom you've known from birth can, does, and will mean to you. I wish it hadn't taken the whole film to get to that point, but it's worth seeing anyway. Not only for the film, but also for the cartoon! Because "Antonia and Jane" is so short, it is preceded by an Academy Award winning animated short called "Creature Comforts" by Nick Park in which zoo animals are interviewed about how they like their lives in the zoo. (Actually it is what's called "claymation" rather than "animation"). It is an absolute delight! For the WMNF Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film.