Antonia And Jane

Antonia And Jane

I have a lot of friends who celebrate their oddness believing they are defective, but colorfully so and they tend to compete in conversations about who is more fucked up. For this reason, I think they would like “Antonia and Jane,” which is the story of two best friends whose lives are a mess but love each other anyway.

What we see at first is Jane Hartman (Imelda Staunton), with her glasses that are too big for her face, not stylishly so just too big and curly hair that she hates because it looks messy. She believes the people at the beauty salon hate her and that this hair is their revenge; she may be right. It has been Antonia McGill’s “best friend” since childhood; from her point of view, their relationship has been based on Antonia’s need to make her feel bad.

Why else would little Antonia start a secret society whose only bylaw was that it would exclude Jane? Now they’re grown up and apart, meeting once a year for dinner which both of them dread so much that each one visits her psychoanalyst twice before going to meet the other one. They have the same analyst, but of course never found out about that.

The thing is, you see: Jane always gets there first; Antonia is always late; and although Jane may be exaggerating how late Antonia really is well let’s just say that if there were ever an Oscar Wilde quote about lateness (“Punctuality is the thief of time”), it would be perfect for this movie except that Jane doesn’t read anything except The Brothers Karamazov while she waits.

They talk but don’t say anything because their feelings are too deep for words or rather, for any words in existence though Antonia would probably drop dead if she knew how envious Jane was of her. Each measures herself against what the other one has done with her life. Meantime they talk about men, because they’re always falling in love with the wrong ones.

Take Norman, for instance, one of Jane’s lost causes, who is impotent until he finally asks Jane to do him “a favor.” What arouses him, he confides, is the prose of Iris Murdoch. Could she maybe read him a little? Could she … start with the back cover? Such is Norman’s literary eroticism that even the blurb from The Sea, the Sea causes instant hard on.

Some women might be grateful for a man whose excitement can be counted on at so little cost to personal self-esteem. Not Jane. She hates Iris Murdoch. Antonia has her troubles with men too; one of her dates likes to tie her up and then ask her trivia questions, such as who said what in which play by Shakespeare. “Macbeth?” she asks hopefully.

“Richard III?” Or there is Howard first met by Jane but later stolen away (or rather given away) to Antonia who takes photographs of body parts (“I’m starting a series on toes”).

One thing that “Antonia and Jane” knows about female friendship, which I am confident is true, is this: they only project onto their friends those qualities they feel are missing in themselves. As if making up for what one lacks, or perhaps it could be said that as a way of acquiring these absent attributes, friends are selected. Antonia is beautiful not so much; but independent and self-contained though not completely. And Jane sees her friend as those things too but also to some extent. Both of them take men to be an alien race with inexplicable ways whose love stories can only supply anecdotes after the event.

This film was directed by Beeban Kidron and written by Marcy Kahan itself a BBC-TV production shot on video tape–and it treats its limited budget as an advantage.

Some sets (the psychiatrist’s room, Jane’s bedroom) look like furniture pushed into the corner of an empty space; others deliberately fill the frame with nondescript furniture such as could furnish the worlds of Sylvester and Tweetie Pie or Tom & Jerry Against such a background Antonia continues struggling with herself unaware that she is using Jane as her yardstick while at the same time neither woman knows she’s doing this to herself because each sees in other what needs measuring up to

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