Over decades, Hollywood has perfected the chick flick formula. The film almost always end with the celluloid damsel no longer in distress once she has found her handsome prince.

Curiously, it is always the girl whose existence is made meaningful by romantic success. Sure, guys end up in love too, but usually in addition to some other success, not in place of it. In Sweet Home Alabama Reese Witherspoon effectively forfeits her city career for romance.  Richard Gere finds love and business direction in Pretty Woman, but as the credits roll all Julia Roberts has is a better wardrobe and a boyfriend. Even Cinderella escapes a life of drudgery by meeting a prince, but for what? Charming gets a kingdom, but Cindy doesn’t exactly land herself a feminist fairytale.

Sometimes ambition is an obstacle to finding love (Miss Congeniality), other times a job is mentioned for posterity’s sake (Bridget Jones), but every energy is dedicated to finding Mr Right. When careers are the main focus, as in How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days, romance and workplace success are invariably tied together.

It seems women can rule whole countries and fight in wars but on screen, it is who they are going home to that matters. Hollywood’s message comes down to: girls who lack the desired career, or are unfulfilled in other parts of life, can still have validation in the arms of the perfect man. Self realization by romance? Pass the sick bucket.

So it is all the more refreshing to find a film challenging the stereotype. Following the lives of the much-loved fifties TV chef Julia Child (Meryl Streep), and Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a noughties New Yorker who blogged about her culinary escapades, Julie & Julia comes from a most unlikely source. Director Nora Ephron is best known for the classic chick flick When Harry Met Sally, and (even more damaging to her feminist credentials), was the mastermind behind the lamentable You’ve Got Mail.

True to Ephron form, in Julie & Julia  there is some romance. What’s interesting is that even once the heroines have found love, they are still seeking fulfillment. As the film opens both are at crossroads. Wannabe-writer Julie, introduced squirming at lunch with her super-successful friends, angsts over her call-centre career.

Meanwhile, half a century earlier, diplomat’s wife Julia Child has all the luxuries she could imagine, a doting husband and an idyllic Parisian lifestyle, but it isn’t enough. A bright woman who like most of her class and generation gave up her career with marriage, she wants to find a purposeful way to spend her time.

Ephron steers refreshingly clear of the female prototype she and a million copycat directors have championed. Julie may not have the media job she craves, but she’s not a stereotypical emotional disaster waiting for a man to rescue her. That’s not to say she’s such a stellar inspiration; the real-life Powell was enormously lucky her blog, rather than those of the thousand other aspiring writers, was plucked out of obscurity. Julia, on the other hand, makes for a fantastic role model. Intelligent and self-possessed, she was the first female graduate of the Cordon Bleu and a revolutionary force in domestic American life.

Julie & Julia is mostly just a piece of fluff, diverting but not overly memorable. It certainly doesn’t have any moments quite as iconic as Meg Ryan’s restaurant scene in When Harry Met Sally. Still, it resonates because for Julie and for Julia, a comfortable life with a delightful husband wasn’t enough. They wanted more, an ambition sorely lacking in so many female characters.

In chick flicks, ambitious women are usually only a step away from certifiable sociopaths in the undesirability stakes. There are strong female role models in films all the time, but they tend to appear in thrillers or actions films, rather than the chick flicks impressionable young girls devour. Moreover, the really strong women on screen, such as Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, tend to be all-or-nothing types; the message being that girls must choose between public or private achievement.

Once upon a stone age, this might have been true. Society did dictate women could only secure their status through their spouse and unsurprisingly this was reflected onscreen. In the West at least, you’d be hard pressed to argue that is still true, and it’s high time Hollywood caught up.

We need more Julie’s and more Julia’s on film, heroines for whom romantic bliss is the icing on the cake but not the cake itself. Ephron has showed that a chick flick can be funny, light-hearted, even frivolous, without offending feminist sensibilities. It isn’t retrograde to suggest screen heroines should fall in love; surely a healthy personal relationship is a goal for most women and, indeed, most men. The point it, that’s not all there is.

It just took two women cooking beef bourguignon to say so.

The trailer for Julie & Julia