Frances Ha

Noah Baumbach’s new heroine, Frances Halliday (Greta Gerwig) is a spirit too big for the spaces she finds herself in. So her mailbox slot reduced her to Frances Ha. The film’s structure is episodic, titled with each new geographical site she busts into then out of. She wants a home but flits from one free or subsidized friend’s place to the next.

She wants to be a dancer but can’t quite get beyond apprentice. She has a flair for choreography but she has boxed herself into that dancing ambition. She’s apparently heterosexual but is fixated on recovering her BGF relationship  with Sophie (Mickey Sumner), who leaves their co-rental for a new roomie who has found an apartment on Sophie’s favourite street and who then moves to Japan with her new fiance. The film’s last scene gives Frances and Sophie that sweeping intense feeling of tacit understanding that Frances blurted out at a dinner party was what she craved as love.So, all plot twists and character moans notwithstanding, the film has a happy ending.  

So this is a love story.  Between women. Who may joke about lesbians but aren’t. It’s a girls’ bromance. And because it’s so chaste and wingy it’s shot in the glimmering and stark black and white of those first ‘50s NYC street friskies, like Pull My Daisy and Shadows.

In their inspired collaboration Gerwig and Baumbach make Frances Ha a disturbingly enigmatic figure. Like her name she has reduced herself. Why can’t such a spirited, privileged beauty get a life? She has no tensions with her parents, whose coddling of their dog suggest how they treated her when she was that size. She comes from a secure, confident middle class -- our parents’, that is, not the endangered species of USA today. 

Why are all the other characters around her similarly unsettled, despite their -- in some significant cases considerable-- wealth? Lev (Adam Driver) has a large flat with a vynyl collection he could base a Village store around, but he’s content to run a revolving door to his bedroom. Lev predicts roommate Dan (Michael Esper) and Frances will  marry but both laugh that off. Sure, Dan’s shorter than Frances, but in PWA cinema (that’s Post Woody Allen) that counts for bupkes. Frances and Dan are close friends who insulate themselves against love by their recurrent tagline “Undatable.” That humorous self-deprecation wards off any advance of their affection. 

With the characters’ drifts, privilege, literacy, wisdom, spontaneous chatter, and their self-restrictive if not -destructive reflexes, this film chronicles another Lost Generation. It’s a generation lost to irony. The incantation of  “undatable” puts the couple’s emotions into quotation marks. At first sign of feeling they step outside them for a knowing look and the label. Penniless but with a new credit card Frances splurges on a weekend in Paris just to use a new friend’s flat. Ironically, she makes no connections there either but en route room gets an invitation to a party there where she would have met a new Jean Pierre Leaud type. This whole silly extravagance is another form of Frances’s irony, as she makes huge moves solely on impulse. Burying yourself with your plastic is spending money ironically, spending it but not quite spending it because it’s not there.  

For fill-in work she returns to her old college to waitress a fundraiser. That seems an attempt to restart herself, to recover a sense of belonging she hasn’t felt since. That’s where her recovery of Sophie begins. That grows out of another disenchantment. Frances watches her charge, an honoured guest congresswoman whom she reveres, pathetically seduce a much younger artist alumnus. Fresh starts, old ruts, 

The film is obviously the Big Mother Screen version of tv’s Girls, especially with the casting of Adam Driver as an upscale version of his Girls stud. So it’s very much a diagnosis of our time. How are we going to find meaningful lives, fulfilling careers, and substantial love after we have studied postmodernism? It was easier to keep ‘em back on the farm. 

Frances ends with a Ha about everything. The Ha can be resignation, despair, detachment, fear, as well as humour, acceptance, and dare I say hope? Irony, as we know from Kierkegaard’s thesis, is not just a literary form but a way of living.