Stars: Anna Friel, Kyle MacLachlan, Michelle Williams, Oliver Milburn, Trudie Styler, Marianne Denicourt

Director: Sandra Goldbacher

Summary: An exploration of a friendship between Holly and Marina, two girls who swear to be friends forever. In later years divorcing parents and drugs threaten their friendship.

ME WITHOUT YOU, directed by Sandra Goldbacher (THE GOVERNESS), follows two girls who promise to be best friends forever. Marina (Anna Friel) is troubled, extroverted, and the product of a broken home, while Holly (Michelle Williams) is a quiet girl who escapes from her overprotective family into a world of books, music, and imagination. As the girls grow up together, their paths diverge but they cling to each other as the one constant in each other's life. Holly also secretly has a strong attraction to Marina's older brother, Nat (Oliver Milburn). Eventually Holly comes to feel trapped by Marina's possessive, controlling friendship, and she realizes that being with Nat is the only way to truly be herself.
Filmed with close attention to period detail, Goldbacher anchors each phase of Holly and Marina's friendship with clothes, production design, and especially music, meant to evoke life in Britain from the 1970s and '80s. From Punk and New Wave to the more materialistic Thatcherite era, Friel and Williams portray two girls desperately trying to keep up with the pace of their lives and the world around them. Ultimately, they have to discover how to be both the girls they were together and the women they have become individually.

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Sandra Goldbacher's intense drama of friendship and betrayal Me Without Youwas not especially liked by UK reviewers, but opened in the US to rave reviews. Carrying the relationship between two teenagers through their student days and into adulthood, it shows the more obviously charismatic Marina (Anna Friel) as parasitic on her more intelligent friend Holly (Michelle Williams) and then utterly devastated when Holly tries to break away (a brief epilogue shows them still involved years later). Best known for her role in Dawson's Creek, Michelle Williams (whose English accent is impeccable) gives a finely nuanced performance; Anne Friel runs the gamut from drug-induced stupor to malice to hysteria with a staginess that is only partly the character's. There are solid performances from Trudy Stiler as the neurotic ex-croupier mother who is part of Marina's problem and Kyle McLachlan as the oddly passive lecturer whom both seduce. The film is good on the passage of time--it has a fine eye for the fashion disasters of 1970s to 90s Britain--yet it's somehow disingenuous in its avoidance of emotional subtext. It's overly partial, too: Holly is obviously a stand-in for the writer-director.

On the DVD:Me Without Youris presented in a widescreen visual ratio of 2.35:1 with Dolby 5.1 digital sound that gives full weight and intensity to a soundtrack which revisits a well-chosen selection of obvious and obscure tracks from the period. It has no extra features. --Roz Kaveney

Aspect Ratio:	2.35 Wide Screen, 16:9 Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Directors Commentary, Production Notes, Trailer
Subtitles:	English
Year:	2001
Release Date:	October 14, 2002
Runtime:	108 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	M P 160 D
Keywords:	You, General, Without, Wide, Screen, Me, Drama
Genre:	Drama