NYFF 2012: "Frances Ha"

I know what you might be think­ing: “What, ANOTHER movie about the trav­ails of young white women seek­ing ful­fill­ment in chal­len­ging urb­an America, someone kill me now.” That feel­ing will not neces­sar­ily go away for the first ten minutes of Frances Ha, wherein Frances (Greta Gerwig) and her best friend Sophie address each oth­er in argu­ably offens­ive faux-Ebonics, share a bed, get drunk, go to a PARTY IN BROOKLYN, WILLIAMFUCKINGSBURG TO BE PRECISE, exchange con­fid­ences about the Men In Their Lives And How Lame They Are, and do a few oth­er things that you might be under the impres­sion that you’ve seen in a movie or on a tele­vi­sion show some­thing like ten or fif­teen thou­sand times before in the last eight months. I can­’t lie to you about that, even if I wanted to. 

But Frances Ha starts to take shape in a some­what more pos­sibly ami­able way after this intro­duc­tion. As a some­what slightly qual­i­fied admirer of the HBO series Girls I can report that the agenda of Frances Ha is not, like that of the series, to con­trive a sort of “look from the inside” at the situ­ations of par­tic­u­lar young women in the cir­cum­stance of seek­ing ful­fill­ment in chal­len­ging urb­an America and from therein to per­form some sort of inver­sion of tra­di­tion­al audi­ence expect­a­tion. No, Frances Ha is a some­what more con­ven­tion­al con­triv­ance, a spe­cif­ic sort-of adult coming-of-age com­edy. Directed by Noah Baumbach from a script by Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, who also plays the title char­ac­ter, Frances Ha brings a reas­on­ably fresh per­spect­ive to mater­i­al that people who go to a lot of film fest­ivals and fol­low a lot of non-audience-connecting film-festival-dubbed “move­ments” or genres might con­sider over­ex­posed to the point of losing-the-will-to-live over.

I’ll try not to be so trite as to assert that what Baumbach brings to the table is a kind of artist­ic detach­ment. But, first, and most strik­ingly obvi­ous, thing first, he does put this mater­i­al through his own par­tic­u­lar sens­ib­il­ity, shoot­ing it in black-and-white and scor­ing it with a bunch of old Georges Delerue music, and hence attach­ing his own wist­ful notion of how this par­tic­u­lar mater­i­al (which I’m going to assume at least ori­gin­ated with Gerwig, as she is, or was, an authen­t­ic rep­res­ent­at­ive of the class por­trayed herein) should be cine­mat­ic­ally rendered. And he and Gerwig go through the trouble of con­struct­ing some­thing of an actu­al nar­rat­ive. The movie begins with Frances declin­ing to move in with her boy­friend on account of hav­ing prom­ised afore­men­tioned best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner) that they’d stick to cohab­it­at­ing until at least their lease ran out, and OF COURSE Sophie’s the one who then turns around and bails into a new room­mate situ­ation. Leaving Frances to “crash” at the big apart­ment of a guy with whom she MIGHT have been able to at least hook up (the movie’s struc­tured around a series of addresses Frances roosts in, which come up in nice white-on-black title cards). Again, I can­not tell a lie: this guy is played by Adam Driver, the big white lug of Girls, and here his char­ac­ter is actu­ally rather charm­ing and goofy in a mild 20-something-semi-cad sort of way. Frances Ha is pretty kind to its male char­ac­ters, and it’s not par­tic­u­larly harsh on Frances her­self, although the movie does­n’t stint on depict­ing her as some­thing of a fuck up. But as it is in fact a pure comedy—Baumbach nev­er over­reaches here in the ways that made parts of Margot At The Wedding the wrong kind of uncomfortable—the view­er is pretty sure things will pick up before Frances has to go root­ing around dump­sters. On the way we are treated to some very awk­ward and funny and enga­ging scenes that often ring quite true. I was par­tic­u­larly taken with a din­ner party sequence in which Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips are cast against type as aging snooty one-time yup­pies who turn out to be not entirely unsym­path­et­ic to Frances; it’s just that, with pretty much very nearly a gen­er­a­tion sep­ar­at­ing them, they do in fact turn out to speak entirely dif­fer­ent lan­guages. The dia­logue is fresh and sharp through­out: little off­hand quirked-out obser­va­tions like “Transportation’s his thing” get some of the movie’s biggest laughs. 

Unlike Joe Swanberg’s oppor­tun­ist­ic and quasi-voyeuristic Hannah Takes The Stairs—a similarly-themed pic­ture star­ring Gerwig for which its dir­ect­or tacked a new name on the act­ress and then sat her in front of, say, Kent Osborne, who’s appar­ently Swanberg’s idea of Brice Parain, and then switched the cam­era on—Frances Ha gives Gerwig the per­former some tasks, in the form of a char­ac­ter who even­tu­ally repairs her­self, some­what, off-screen. I’m a Baumbach fan, but it’s been some time since he’s made a film this…I think the word is “win­ning.” But there you have it. Nevertheless, if I read one more piece about the movie refer­ring to it as a “valentine” or “love let­ter” to its star, with whom Baumbach reportedly has some kind of per­son­al involve­ment, I may barf even more prodi­giously than Mickey Sumner’s char­ac­ter does at a cru­cial point in the film.