, 86 min, 2012
Director: Noah Baumbach
Writers: Noah Baumbach (screenplay), Greta Gerwig (screenplay)
Stars: Greta Gerwig, Mickey Sumner, Adam Driver
Some movies are made for the masses. Others make the personal universal. Still others find ways of seeing into your very soul and speaking to your personal experience with immediacy and emotional truth. This is such a film. Noah Baumbach’sFrances Ha is, like the title character’s final choreographed dance number at the film’s denouement, messy and mannered in quasi-equal measure. This is a precisely-observed, impeccably composed, elegantly-photographed and uncannily acted portrait of a specific individual who this reviewer found infinitely relatable because of her tentative, uncertain nature and the precarious relationships she’s forged with friends and roommates. Oh, and her unanchored sensibilities.
Greta Gerwig stars as Frances, a 27-year-old apprentice modern dancer in New York whose relationship with a young professional called Dan has, at the film’s start, stalled and ultimately gone sour because she insists on remaining the roommate of her best friend since college Sophie (Mickey Sumner, a revelation). Sophie, meanwhile, is seeking to trade up for a new living situation in Tribeca with a cleaner, more reliable roommate. Meanwhile, Sophie’s relationship to up-and-coming businessman “Patch” (the kind of guy who calls people “brah” and wears baseball caps) is about to hit the next plateau – engagement, much to Frances’ chagrin.
All of these factors, in conjunction with Frances’ lack of job security, lead to various modes of “trying to figure life out” – sleeping in the living room of two friendly acquaintances of Sophie’s, Benji and Lev (Michael Zegen and Girls‘ Adam Driver), with the former labeling Frances “undateable”; a temporary stay with a put-upon fellow ballet company member (Grace Gummer, who I first thought was Meryl Streep’s other daughter Mamie); a visit to her parents in Sacramento (the actual Mr. and Mrs. Gerwig, turns out) for the holidays; and even an impromptu 2-day sojourn to Paris on the dime of a pre-approved credit card during which she stays in the apartment of a couple (one of whom is Josh Hamilton) she meets at a dinner party while trying to hook up with an old casual college acquaintance.
This untethered drifting on Frances’ part is both caused by and furthers a rift between Frances and Sophie, resulting in the festering of old wounds. As Sophie grows up, Frances lies in a state of perpetual arrested development. As the film starts, Sophie jokes, the two are like “an old lesbian couple that doesn’t have sex anymore.” Indeed, throughout (even in the midst of in-fighting betwixt them), the duo says “I love you” more than most romantic couples. I believe it was Meryl Streep herself who once said “Every good actor knows ‘I love you’ is a question, not a statement.” By the film’s end, they’ll be tentatively taking off on the road to recovering their lost bonds, but they won’t be as close as before. This is, ultimately, the story of a platonic romance between one person and “herself” (her spiritual doppelganger) with that spiritual kinship fracturing and the person splitting in two – metaphorically of course (Frances talks about Sophie multiple times as if they “were the same person”).
Noah Baumbach is seemingly this past couple decades’ (youthful) answer to Woody Allen, and is just one of a host of other writer-directors who seem to aspire to carry his mantle; at a post-screening Q&A via Skype, I asked Ms. Gerwig if her recent career turns working with such writer-directors as Baumbach, Allen, the Duplass Brothers, Joe Swanberg and Whit Stillman is any indication of her desire to work with other writers who direct and her answer showed some like-minded career ambitions, including Mike Leigh, the Dardenne Brothers, the Coen Brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson, David O. Russell and even an out-of-retirement Steven Soderbergh. Baumbach himself made his Stillman-esque yet cine-literate debut withKicking & Screaming (1995; not the Will Ferrell soccer comedy from 2005) before turning to such acidic-witted dramedy asThe Squid and the Whale (2005), Margot at the Wedding (2007) and Greenberg (2010), which also starred Ms. Gerwig; one audience member asked about similarities he found between Frances and Stiller’s misanthropic title character in that film. Baumbach’s also co-written some of the more adult and imaginative recent Wes Anderson films such as The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009).
The cine-literate viewer may find Frances Ha is like a circa 1962 Godard film as interpreted by Woody Allen (or, indeed, Noah Baumbach). Insistently scored with vintage French New Wave music by Georges Delerue, occasionally intruded upon by unofficial theme song “Modern Love” by David Bowie, the film has been shot in resplendent black-and-white by Sam Levy and, indeed, is so austere and mannered in its oh-so-careful compositions it could’ve been an early 60s Godard film (thinkMy Life to Live or Masculine/Feminine). Ms. Gerwig says she sees her character less as an Anna Karina heroine than as Carol Lombard with the slapstick physicality (befitting a hot mess of a modern young woman) of Buster Keaton. An apt comparison.
This film is at once both reflexive and unique. At times, I thought of a film I saw in the same seat in the same theater almost two and a half years ago – Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture (2010). Perhaps it is because of Dunham’s film and now her HBO series Girls that we are starting to be inundated with lost twenty-something female-driven narratives. It is a credit to Baumbach and his star/girlfriend/co-writer Ms. Gerwig that we now have another voice added to the cacophony, and that that voice rings so true. This is one of the year’s very best films.
Filed under: 2013 Tagged: 2013/May/17, limited