Greta Gerwig and Mickey Sumner (Pine District, LLC)Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha achieves something that is rare in cinema. It creates a distinct, internally consistent world, fully populated with vivid characters. Unfortunately, those characters are fucking hipsters.
“I Internet-acquired three very rare Ray-Bans. I had a great day.” I don’t know anybody who talks like that, and I have to give props to what may be the film’s most almost-likeable character, but this is the world Baumbach delivers. From The Squid and the Whale (which I liked) to Greenberg, the director tends to fill his movies with insufferable boors. Many hail this new film as a delightful mid-career course correction. But from the movie’s opening frame, the spoiled man- and woman-children of Frances Ha operate in a precious, blinkered milieu, selfish and largely unsympathetic even when they aren’t urinating in public.
I can be forgiving toward coming-of-age movies. I gladly cheer on adolescents and eternal teenagers as they make mistakes and find themselves. So part of me appreciates Frances’ alienation and self-loathing. But it’s hard to appreciate a character with the luxury to make the kinds of extravagant mistakes she makes. For all the indie trappings of this Modern Woman, the movie treats its would-be heroine with something bordering on infantilism.
Greta Gerwig and Adam Driver (Pine District, LLC)We meet Frances (Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote the screenplay with her boyfriend, Baumbach) play fighting with her likewise 20-something BFF Sophie (Mickey Sumner, Sting’s daughter). I am all on board with plot arcs of lost youth trying to find themselves, but Frances is so lost and self-sabotaging it’s pathological. Constantly playing for the approval of those around her, she comes from a middle class Sacramento background but sacrifices a self she doesn’t know or understand in order to seem as cool and privileged as the people around her.
The most devastating example of this is also the most class-unconscious. How many of us can afford to make the kind of weekend mistake she makes mid-way through the film?
Gerwig’s character has been compared to Annie Hall, but her grating awkwardness is more embarrassing than endearing. Rather than celebrating the kind of spontaneity of early Truffaut, Baumbach and Gerwig seem to place their heroine in increasingly unheroic situations, finding more expensive, unappealing ways to slack and avoid growing up.
Cinematographer Sam Levy, who gave Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy its casual, intimate look, shot Frances Ha in digital black and white on a Canon EOS 5D Mark II DSLR, similar to the tool used to make the excellent documentary To Hell and Back. That title is an accurate assessment of the feeling that many viewers not in its target demographic may experience. As a proponent of good old black-and-white film, I have to admit Frances Ha has a good tonal range, from deep blacks to pasty whites. The murky, claustrophobic compositions make it a spot-on impersonation of Woody Allen circa Manhattan (with a dollop of Leos Carax and heaping spoonfuls of the French New Wave), sans appealing characters or funny jokes. Frances Ha plays less like a comedy than a horror movie, an uncomfortable journey through the hell of a rootless, self-conscious twenty-something with horribly pretentious friends. I shake in trepidation at the possibility of an Adam Sandler remake. In drag.
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Directed by Noah Baumbach
Written by Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig
With Greta Gerwig, Mickey Sumner, Adam Driver
Rated R for sexual references, language, and fucking hipsters
Running time 86 minutes
