My Review: Frances Ha

I finally found my favourite movie this award season. I read about Frances Ha a few months ago but I dint make the effort to watch it because it sounds something like Greta Gerwig’s previous attempt Lola Versus which was average at best. If only I watched it instead of another rerun of Mean Girls (Tina Fey people!). This movie is so much more than that. Maybe it’s the writers’ relationship that makes this bittersweet comedy occasionally inspired albeit charming and oh so watchable.

Shot in black and white and full of allusions to the French New Wave (including the soundtrack and

montages) it is a portrait of a confused Frances, a twenty-seven year old struggling to find her place in the world. Perennially broke, she is stuck as an apprentice at a professional dance company, teaches classes to kids, and dreams of becoming a great dancer someday.  Frances Ha has very little plot. Like many indie films today, it is highly episodic.

As the film opens, we see Frances and her best friend Sophie (the fact is reiterated to death in the movie by the dialogue “She is me with different hair”) lie on the bed and tell each other the story of their lives (how they would get great jobs, live in Paris and travel the world).  This set the tone of the movie where the friendship between Frances and Sophie is much more important any other fleeting relationship they might be in. Frances breaks up with her boyfriend because she can’t move out of her apartment that she shares with Sophie.  Eventually this reality-escaping friendship that seems eternal until (as inevitably happens) one party decides to loosen the ties in order to move on. When Sofie does just that, moving out in order to share a coveted Tribeca apartment with another friend, Frances is left unhinged.

She drifts from one apartment to another, one city to another trying to make a sense of life. She keeps making mistakes. She keeps trying to escape a state of arrested development but is unable to without her friend. She is not a likeable character; I found her clueless, irrational, sometimes irritating and even cringe-inducing at times. But I loved her. It’s not specific to the character but it’s about a specific time in life, when the sudden urgency to define oneself can make people seem cruel, crazy or resentful.

All in all, the movie is graceful, awkward, hilarious and sad but in the end I loved it because of Greta Gerwig. She bought the character to life and I loved it. If I have to talk about this movie in one line, I would quote this review I have some time back:

“It's a film that gives us a female central character living on her own terms, and it's remarkable how refreshing, even rare, this feels.”