“Fwends gets lost in its own playful attempts to expand film as a platform, but restores focus as it powers down.”

The meandering, melancholic doubts of young adulthood are a classic popular cultural motif, grappling for increasingly enigmatic truths. The entirety of youthful experience is a riddle of puzzling language, vague encounters and elusive conclusions. Even though succeeding generations have ostensibly endured at least some of the universal, twentysomething lessons ambling through Fwends, with each passing era the barriers of technology and culture obscure perception. Something as simple as meeting an acquaintance and walking through a city, though, is a timeless enterprise, and that familiarity is where Sophie Somerville chooses to open her debut feature.

It’s a clever pronouncement because who hasn’t valued reconnecting with a friend, the excitement and anticipation of greeting them upon arrival? Jessie (Melissa Gan) reunites with Em (Emmanuelle Mattana) at an indistinct transit station but not before an amusing and relatable hide and seek over mobile, proximities screened by unfamiliarity and circumstance, until their inevitable, silly recognition of each other, phones relentlessly in hands. Much of Fwends floats with similar buoyancy. Driven and pragmatic Em is visiting from Sydney for the weekend, a seemingly impromptu trip, and free spirit Jessie is her guide around Melbourne. The two immediately traverse the city with Em yearning for the pick-me-up of a coffee and Jessie revealing herself to be an unreliable navigator, their banter steady nonetheless, hovering over central avenues and grazing against side streets, as immediate as the two women weaving through the central business district and beyond. As they catch up, their troubles and exasperations quickly pepper the small talk, worrisome jabs tossed in between trivial quips, sowed into the conversation.

Somerville extends the ambling discourse through Melbourne at a distance, and across the first half of Fwends the camera tracks Jessie and Em in wide shots, the hum of the weekend city interjecting into their movements. This approach removes the women from immediate judgment, holding space for young adulthood to fascinate with remote mystery. So when Em brushes off a recent workplace sexual assault and Jessie coasts in the excuses of post-breakup malaise, the revelations are bound with the nondescript ordinariness of the Melbourne cityscape. There’s a sad regularity to the admissions and an uneasy acceptance of them as rites of passage to be shared by friends, as commonplace as the urban spaces that surround them. Somerville, in a witty, likely improvised screenplay co-written with Gan and Mattana, is intuitive enough to inject nuance and humor into dialogue and situations. Otherwise, the unraveled concerns and barbed reminiscences Jessie and Em swap could approximate indie film doomscrolling to an audience lurking, surveilling from afar.

As day drifts into the evening and the women return to Jessie’s apartment, dismissed as a ‘soulless gray box’, they continue reacquaintance, at times frustrating one another before falling into the frivolous rhythms that best friends rekindle without hesitation. Somerville never reveals how Jessie and Em got to know each other, and this adds to the enigma. When they wrap themselves in shimmering organza, resplendent in complementary facial masks, however, and perch outside on the balcony, it’s suggested they have enjoyed one another’s company since girlhood. Now they’re unknowing and lost princesses and the realm is no longer make believe. From encounters with a clown to the lightness of the title Fwends, the lingering yet disappearing magic of childhood is subtly mourned throughout.

As the short weekend unpacks, though, the film gives way to impulses that break narrative monotony but fall into gimmickry. When Em and Jessie get high, their tripping cascades into a kaleidoscope of effects and filters, disarming sequences that reel social media perspective into the language of traditional feature filmmaking. Earlier, Jessie admonishes Em to put away her phone and be present, and this drug-induced sequence is in direct correlation to that chiding. It’s a purposeful acknowledgement of modern relationships, too, but not successful. Fwends gets lost in its own playful attempts to expand film as a platform (at one point a random French narrator opines about the crushing forces of late-stage neoliberal capitalism, for example) but restores focus as it powers down.

In the morning before she leaves, Em reclines against Jessie, reading from a book and not the omnipresent rectangle in her palm: “Another name for human solidarity is love,” she recites (likely from Bill McKibben’s Falter), “and when I think about our world in its present form, that is what overwhelms me.” So, while twentysomething enlightenment remains constant in its doubts across generations, perhaps this moment is more burdened than previous ones. It’s simply exhausting, especially if taken alone. This is a heavy outlook for two young women adrift somewhere in their twenties, but in her solid debut feature, Somerville gives the emblematic characters at least a passing weekend for the solidarity of friendship to accompany them into the future.

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