Frances Ha

This is one of those movies that I’ve scrolled past maybe a hundred times while surfing Netflix – a great American pastime. (International past time? Netflix is a worldwide thing right?). The description always turned me off: “She’s a dancer and dreamer adrift in New York City. Friendship is what keeps her world turning.”

Eh. But I was bored the other day, and so I decided to give it five minutes. And then I watched the whole thing.

Frances Ha is written by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, and directed by Noah Baumbach. The film follows Frances, a 28-year-old adolescent who is emotionally in love with her best friend and at a loss for what to do with her life. In your 20s your soul mates are your friends, and planning for the future means finding a party for tonight. But that stage doesn’t last forever, and Frances Ha tracks the painful trajectory of becoming an individual.

First, Frances’s roommate moves out. Then, she loses her job. This life that she clearly thought was going to last forever (or maybe she didn’t think at all) is revealed to be totally temporary. Bit by bit, distractions and supports ebb away until she’s left alone, and forced to deal with her self.

There’s a feeling of total safety in an intimate friendship, where you really feel like part of a whole. Growing up, this something is lost, and replaced with an emptiness that you have to figure out how to fill up with yourself—whoever that is. Frances’ solution is to move in with two random guys and become basically their mascot, and go back to work as an RA at her college. She makes safe choices at first, re-treading places she’s already been. But that doesn’t work out. The one unbreakable rule of life is that you can’t move backward, and she doesn’t fit in to the places she used to any more.

Later, she tries to make bold choices. After losing her job, she buys a plane ticket for Paris on a whim. But the reality of a weekend alone in Paris is pretty much a bummer, and she blew her savings on it. These kinds of decisions are ones that work in movies, not in real life. Catching a last minute flight to Paris is a cool thing to do, but not necessarily the right thing to do. Frances is trying on lots of different life styles, but none of them really fit, because none of them were made for her.

Greta Gerwig is a delight in this. I’ve seen her in a few things and been interested, but never blown away. She lights up the screen here, she fills up every frame. She’s in every scene and she’s funny and awkward and real and confident and unsure and inspiring and cringe-worthy. Her character is completely realized. Which is interesting, because the rest of the characters are pretty flat. I think they’re supposed to be stereotypical, because we’re seeing everything from Frances’ point of view, and she’s got a limited perception of the world.

This is also really funny. In a Woody Allen kind of way. The jokes lie in the miscommunication and missed signals. One of Frances’ male roommates is clearly in love with her, and his awkward 20-something way of showing it is to make fun of her for being “undateable.” At the end of the movie he shows back up, with a new tune. During their conversation he interjects with “undateable” and she says, “oh I know, I’m totally undateable.” But then he says what he’d always meant which is: “No, I’M undateable.” Then he looks at her—“what about you? Are you still…?” And she repeats the same old joke in the same old way, totally missing his point: “Who me? Oh yeah. Completely undateable.”

Frances Ha is clearly made for people in their mid to late 20s. The jokes just hit too close to home. But it’s a funny and charming piece that would be enjoyable for anyone looking to relive an exciting, lonely, awkward, and pretty amazing part of life.