Willie & Phil

Willie & Phil is a 1980 film directed by Paul Mazursky and starring Margot Kidder and Michael Ontkean.

Plot

The film is set in the 1970s and amidst the counterculture chic of that era. Willie, a high school English teacher who plays jazz piano (Michael Ontkean), and Phil, a fashion photographer (Ray Sharkey), meet coming out of the Bleecker Street Cinema where Jules et Jim has just been shown and become friends. They both fall in love with Jeannette, a girl from Kentucky (Margot Kidder).

Critical responses

The film was reviewed by Pauline Kael in The New Yorker. "It could be that the theme of Jules et Jim, which preoccupies Mazursky - woman as the source of life and art, and woman as destroyer - is just what he can't handle. The ad for Willie & Phil does bring out the film's latent subject: we see the open mouth of a giant goddess who is holding two men in the palm of her hand. They reach up to her with their offerings - one with a bottle of wine, the other with a bunch of flowers. She may be breathing life into these dwarf suitors or preparing to devour them along with their gifts. Either way, she's a source of awe and terror. All through the picture, Mazursky has been trying to demystify what he experiences as mystifying. This movie is a little monument to screwed-up notions of what women are."