There are women you dream of being BFFs with, women you dream of getting drunk with, and eating tacos with, and analysing relationships with, and flicking through magazines with while watching trashy TV.

Women like Diane Keaton and Miranda July and Regina Spektor. You know the types who wear their intelligence lightly and even though they create pretty powerful pieces of art (Annie Hall, Me, You and Everybody We Know, Begin to Hope) would, you hope, not judge you over the way you find Saturday Morning Kitchen comforting when you are hungover. 

Greta Gerwig, star of Greenberg and To Rome with Love, is our latest fantasy bestie: smart, talented, funny and she probably gets a good discount for Band of Outsiders that she wouldn’t mind sharing with us. 

We envisage some day eating hummus with her at hip New York lunch destinations. But, lo – a Sting offspring has gotten in there first. In the latest issue of New York Magazine, Gerwig and Mickey Sumner (the 29-year-old daughter of Sting and Trudie Styler who has segued from a flirtation with visual art and a stint at Parsons The New School for Design into an acting career) are interviewed about their upcoming film, Frances Ha. The pair play best friends negotiating tricky 20-something territory – jobs, boyfriends, etc – in NYC and apparently the friendship has spilled over into real life. 

The interviewer notes that ‘they pose for photos in a pile of crisscrossed limbs, Sumner’s head resting on Gerwig’s shoulder’ and ‘wrap their arms around each other and rock back and forth’ when Sumner has to leave to go to see her acting coach. 

Gerwig, who co-wrote the film with her director-boyfriend Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale), explains that she decided on the theme of female friendship in adulthood because she often watched films wishing ‘we’d spend a whole movie on the two friends as opposed to whatever plot machinations are going on’. 

Despite being jealous of the fact that Sumner has stolen Gerwig from under our noses, we welcome this film focus on female friendship because while it is a common theme in sitcoms (Rachel and Monica in Friends, Jess and Cece in New Girl, the SATC crew, Hannah and Marnie in Girls), we feel it has been neglected in movies and literature, which have tended to concentrate more on sister or mother-daughter relationships (a whole other kettle of fish...).     

See the gallery for the best female friendships, on screen and in real life.