Girl on Girl

Friendship is almost as complicated and compelling as love. It’s romance without the sex, whether between members of the same or opposite genders. Marina (Anna Friel)–pretty, vivacious and rebellious on the outside but insecure and empty on the inside–and Holly (Michelle Williams)–shy, intellectual, also insecure–have been best friends since childhood in London in the 1970s. Despite increasingly divergent lifestyles, they seem unwilling to cut loose from one another. Me Without You charts what happens as Marina’s growing possessiveness and manipulative behavior take their toll on Holly. An intermittently involving film, it features strong performances but no sense of time and place outside Holly and Marina’s insular world–nothing that would place their characters in the context of the world around them. And while nicely conveying the intensity of feeling that can nurture or destroy a relationship, the film fails to generate any real sympathy for either character past adolescence.