In the Company of Women (Las buenas compañías, 2023): Female Solidarity, First Love, and the Choice Toward Freedom

Sometimes a person realizes where their heart is heading before they understand the world they belong to. Yet walking toward where the heart pulls is never entirely free. For some, even acknowledging love is an act of defiance against the order established by society.

In the Company of Women (Las buenas compañías, 2023) is a work that portrays women’s rights, same-sex love, and a young girl’s journey to understanding the world of adults, set against 1970s Spain.

In this film, women’s solidarity does not remain a grandiose slogan. It begins with the actions of women attempting to determine their own lives and the small spaces they carve out for one another. The feelings blossoming between two young girls within that space demonstrate that love is not merely a private matter, but something formed amid the conditions of an era and a society.

🌿 The Moments When This Film Seeps In Deeply

• Those who have conflicted between love and social gaze: It recalls the moments when understanding one’s feelings was less difficult than bringing them out into the world.
• Those interested in the power forged by women’s solidarity: It draws attention to the process in which women who have lived different lives join hands for a single right.
• Those seeking works that delicately handle love between women: It allows one to examine not only the flutter of first love, but also the secrets and imbalances residing within relationships.
• Those wishing to encounter women’s voices erased from history: It prompts reflection on how personal love and social struggle surrounding the right to abortion are intertwined.
• Those curious about how relationships help a person grow: This is why the work is worth following to the end—to observe the changes left by the two people’s relationship and the meaning inherent in women’s solidarity.

🎞 Note Before Watching the Film

It deals with same-sex romance and women’s right to abortion as primary subjects, while also depicting the oppression of family and society alongside the realities of the adult world.

Rather than explicit expressions, it is a character-driven historical drama that weights human emotion, relationships, and historical conflict.

🎬 Film Information

• Title: Las buenas compañías (In the Company of Women, 2023)
• Director: Sílvia Munt
• Screenplay: Jorge Gil Munarriz, Sílvia Munt
• Country: Spain, France
• Genre: Drama
• Runtime: 93 minutes
• Platform: VOD and international film festival screenings
• Cast: Alícia Falcó, Itziar Ituño, Elena Tarrats

📖 Plot and the Unfolding Context of Historical Conflict in In the Company of Women [No Spoilers]

In 1977 Spain, 16-year-old girl Bea lives through a period where movements of change stir across society following the Franco dictatorship. She begins to question existing social order as she participates in a women’s organization active for women’s rights and safe abortion.

Amid this, Bea meets Miren, a slightly older girl raised in a wealthy family, and develops special feelings for her. As the two grow closer, the circumstances Miren has been concealing begin to surface.

Meanwhile, the women’s organization Bea participates in extends its activities across the border to help women desiring abortions. As personal love and the struggle for women’s rights intersect, Bea confronts the adult reality she had never known.

Conflict within the family, social norms forced upon women, and the desire to protect a loved one intertwine within a single narrative. The film follows the process of love, solidarity, and growth experienced by a young girl passing through that summer.

🌿 The Discovery of Love and the Interpretation of Relationships in In the Company of Women

What matters in the relationship between Bea and Miren is not simply the fact that two girls are drawn to each other. The two possess different social environments and conditions of life.

Bea is a character who expresses her feelings relatively directly. On the other hand, Miren, despite resting within the social condition of a good family, cannot freely choose the reality she faces.

This difference creates a subtle imbalance in their relationship.

For Bea, love is an experience of discovering herself, whereas for Miren, love is an experience of confronting the weight of a pre-existing reality.

Thus, their relationship is far from a romantic first love sustained solely by flutter. A gap larger than expected exists between loving someone and understanding another person’s life.

🕊️ Interpretation of In the Company of Women: The Space of Survival Forged by Women’s Solidarity

The core of this work is the community of women.

The women’s organization is not depicted merely as a group shouting political slogans. They are individuals taking practical action so that women desiring abortions in that society can safely receive help.

The historical background dealt with in the film includes the actual Spanish women’s rights movement and the Basauri 11 case (Las once de Basauri).

In this case, which lasted from 1976 to 1985, 11 working-class women underwent criminal proceedings regarding abortion. This case served as an important catalyst for spreading discussion surrounding abortion rights in Spanish society. In 1985, abortion was partially decriminalized under restrictive conditions in Spain.

In this context, the solidarity of women in the film is not abstract sisterhood.

• Listening to someone’s story.
• Risking danger to help another woman.
• Accepting a problem difficult to bear alone as a shared responsibility.

Solidarity in this film is not an emotion understanding one another, but an action that genuinely safeguards each other’s lives.

🎹 Interpretation of Mise-en-scène and the Meaning of Silence in In the Company of Women

While recreating the ethos of the 1970s, the film does not focus on flaunting retro scenery.

Instead, it exhibits the constraints experienced by women at the time through characters’ facial expressions, gazes, and conversations taking place in everyday spaces.

Particularly, Miren’s piano playing functions as an important scene for understanding the character’s interiority. Surrounded by social standing and familial expectations, music functions as a limited space where Miren can express herself.

Moreover, the director utilizes long-take scenes and a character-centric camera to capture the moments when emotion is forged. It is a direction focusing on characters’ reactions and subtle relational shifts rather than visual incidents.

🔎 Reinterpreting the Ending of In the Company of Women — Scars Left on Growth and Relationships

The conclusion of this work differs from a stereotypical romance ending where the love between Bea and Miren overcomes all reality and concludes happily.

Miren is pregnant, and safe abortion was difficult to choose in Spain at the time. Ultimately, a journey toward Biarritz, France, begins with the help of Bea and the women’s organization. At the time, abortion was legalized in France.

Along this process, Bea’s mother Feli discovers the two girls’ relationship. A gap in generations and values emerges between the mother—who discovers her daughter’s romance—and the daughter, who refuses to hide her feelings.

However, the film does not end the mother-daughter relationship as a simple confrontation. Feli is likewise a figure formed within the norms and silence of the era she lived through, and she confronts her own attitude in the process of understanding her daughter.

On the way back from France, a quiet yet meaningful current of reconciliation forms between mother and daughter.

In the final scene, Bea sits in the back seat of the car, engaging in the action of flicking her father’s pocketknife open and closed harmlessly. A firmness unlike before remains on Bea’s face. Through the gaze and light of the final scene, the director expresses the transformation that Bea can no longer return to the girl she was before.

This ending declares that Bea’s growth is not a matter of returning to past innocence, but the process of living while carrying the reality she has come to know.

What Bea has gained is love, the experience of understanding others’ pain, and an attitude of not losing her own voice. Conversely, what she has lost is the childhood conviction that the world would be as simple and safe as she believed.

The film presents no definitive answer regarding what shape the relationship between Miren and Bea takes afterward. That whitespace prevents judging the two people’s love through simple standards of failure or success.

⚖️ Review of In the Company of Women — The Intersection of Personal Freedom and Historical Oppression

The female narrative of this work is composed of two layers.

One is the story of young women attempting to choose their feelings, and the other is the social struggle of women attempting to determine their own bodies and lives themselves.

The two stories are not separated from each other.

Bea loving Miren and the women’s organization helping those desiring abortions both demonstrate how narrow the scope of permitted choice was for women.

In a society where women are not granted the right to choice, can love and freedom truly be preserved solely by individual will?

Rather than plumbing this issue with sufficient depth, the film concentrates on Bea’s perspective. Because of this, the historical scale of the women’s movement or the individual stories of participants are handled relatively limitedly.

Nonetheless, it is a meaningful female-centric drama in that it connects the growth of a young girl with the history of a female community.

💬 In the Company of Women — Female Representation and the Meaning of the Ending

Q1. Is the relationship between Bea and Miren a simple friendship, or a romance between women? It is difficult to view it as a simple friendship. Feelings of attraction toward one another and romantic intimacy clearly exist between the two.

However, the film avoids sensationalizing the relationship, dealing with first love and realistic conflict side by side. Thus, it is suitable for audiences seeking works centered on romance between women.

Q2. Which is central: the women’s rights movement or the love between the two? Both axes operate together, but the narrative viewpoint is concentrated on Bea.

The women’s movement serves simultaneously as the historical background and the occasion for Bea to mature. On the other hand, the relationship with Miren is a personal experience leading Bea to understand her own feelings and the reality of others.

Still, had the stories of other figures participating in the women’s movement been handled more deeply, the density as a historical drama would have risen a notch further.

Q3. Is the ending of In the Company of Women a happy ending? It is not a stereotypical romance happy ending.

Neither is it an ending where the two people’s relationship is neatly wrapped up or their future guaranteed. Instead, it focuses on Bea’s growth and the transformation of the mother-daughter relationship.

Therefore, it may resonate more deeply with audiences who place meaning on the process wherein a person experiences reality and forms their own attitude, rather than the achievement of love.

✨ In the Company of Women — Love Alters One’s World, and Solidarity Moves an Era

The reason this film remains valid today is that women’s freedom is not a problem completed in the past.

The right to determine one’s body, the right to choose the person one loves, and the right to independence from familial expectations and social norms remain real questions.

Particularly, the relationship between Bea and Miren demonstrates that love between women does not remain merely within the category of personal sexual identity or romance. It is likewise the process of discovering who one is and confirming the right not to be defined by others’ gazes.

From the perspective of female narrative, the value of this work lies in not treating love and political solidarity as separate issues.

A woman’s freedom is not completed alone; it becomes a reality only within relationships that safeguard each other’s choices.

🌙 What Is the Way to Protect Love?

At times, respecting a person so they can choose their own life demands greater courage than holding onto someone you love.

How would you choose if you were in their shoes?

Would you confront society to protect a loved one, or take a step back to respect the other person’s choice?

🎬 Violet Screen Curation — Works Dealing with Women’s Love and Freedom

1. Carmen y Lola (2018)
   • Deals with the love of two women living within a Spanish Gypsy community. It is a romance between women where family, tradition, and personal freedom collide.
2. Elisa y Marcela (2019)
   • A period drama based on true events. It portrays the relationship of two women who attempted to protect their love amidst social constraints.