Noah Baumbach (2012)
A friend of Frances’s friend Sophie is surprised to learn they’re the same age – ‘You seem a lot older’, the woman says, ‘but less grown up’. Even though the remark is meant to hurt, it’s a shade too cruel in the circumstances. It’s also true. There’s something of the overgrown adolescent about Frances physically; emotionally, she seems reluctant to move away from the time when she and Sophie were best friends at school. Frances is pretty possessive about this friendship – angrily so in one scene, after Sophie has paired up with a boring financier. (It’s not particularly convincing that he would pair up with her.) Frances is trying to make a life in New York. That’s a long way from her native California but adult life – with its expectations of a progressing career and developing personal relationships – would be a matter of playing away from home for Frances wherever she happened to be. Whatever she does, doesn’t work – whether she sticks at something (like trying to dance for a living) or acts on impulse (she goes to Paris for a weekend and spends it in continuous solitude). It’s not easy to describe the protagonist of Frances Ha without making her sound like a cliché – an eccentric whose wacky humour is a front for her unhappiness – but Frances Ha comes over as fresh and individual, thanks to Greta Gerwig, who plays Frances and who co-wrote the screenplay with Noah Baumbach. He and Gerwig are now both writing and life partners. Perhaps it’s because Baumbach is to some extent celebrating the woman he loves that the tone of Frances Ha is more good-natured than that of his previous movies. Even so, he’s too good a film-maker not to be also fascinated by Gerwig as a presence and performer in a less personally partial way.
Greta Gerwig, whose early work was in Mumblecore, has proved herself a skilful and distinctive actress in Damsels in Distress as well as Greenberg, but you’re bound to wonder as you watch Frances Ha how autobiographical the piece is. (Gerwig’s own parents, who are not actors, play Frances’ parents.) Whatever the answer to that question, it’s clear that she and Baumbach are also channelling Woody Allen movies. (Gerwig was likeable but couldn’t be much more than that in the unremarkable role that Allen wrote for her in last year’s To Rome with Love.) When Frances breaks into little bursts of impromptu dance, the effect is charming but the movement also suggests an inability to express herself fully – it connotes Diane Keaton’s la-di-da moments in Annie Hall and the black-and-white cinematography of Frances Ha (by Sam Levy) naturally brings to mind Manhattan. Greta Gerwig shares too with Diane Keaton a natural, radiant warmth and the precision you need to play dither convincingly. Gerwig, who has terrific physical dynamism, is well supported by Mickey Sumner as Sophie. (At the start of the movie, Sumner’s Sophie looks more of a misfit than Frances so her conventional progress is a bit of a surprise to the viewer as well as a shock to Frances.) Others who register in the mainly youthful cast include Adam Driver, Michael Zegen and Grace Gummer.
It took me some time to get into Frances Ha. I didn’t feel (or wasn’t conscious of feeling) envious of or nostalgic for the lives of young people starting work or trying to get somewhere doing something more or less artistic. But I felt a resistance to their lifestyle and Baumbach isn’t lampooning these youngsters or their values. (When Frances goes to a dinner party with thirty-somethings, the tone is more satirical: this is where the ‘You seem a lot older’ barb occurs.) It was only once Frances’s failure to get onto the same wavelength as her contemporaries became clear that I was able to engage with the film. The heroine’s Christmas at home in California was the turning point for me. Because it’s so rapidly done and so full of emotion the effect is rather overwhelming – Frances is vivid and smiling but evidently unhappy, especially when she waves goodbye to her parents, distraught both that the time she’s had with them hasn’t been enough to make her feel better and that it’s now over. In company, Frances says ‘ha’ and ‘ha, ha’ nervously every so often; the other explanation for the film’s title is a lovely joke near the end which it wouldn’t do to spoil for anyone who happens to read this note and hasn’t seen the film. At the very start, Frances is ending a relationship of sorts with a boy who likes cats. There are some photos of kittens at this point but, unusually for a Noah Baumbach film, no dogs or felines in peril later on.
27 July 2013
