by
Julien Faddoul
*** (3 stars)
d – Noah Baumbach
w – Noah Baumbach, Greta Gerwig
ph – Sam Levy
pd – Sam Lisenco
ed – Jennifer Lame
p – Noah Baumbach, Scott Rudin, Rodrigo Teixeira,
Lila Yacoub
Cast: Greta
Gerwig, Mickey Sumner, Michael Esper, Adam Driver, Michael Zegen, Charlotte
d'Amboise, Grace Gummer
Frances, a twenty-seven, blonde dancing apprentice
living in New York is on a date. When the cheque comes she insists on paying due
to acquiring a recent tax rebate. However, the waitress informs her that her
card isn’t going through. Upon hearing this she turns to her date and, with all
the gawky, agile, awkward integrity that the young actress Greta Gerwig
possess, utters “I’m so embarrassed. I’m not a real person.”
At what age do you become a real person? This is
has been the number one predicament for most American filmmakers of the last 15
years. This chapter of the story of the cinema has concerned itself with a
blitzkrieg of aged immaturity, as well as the popularising of such banal terms
as “The Man-Child” and “The Manic-Pixie-Dream-Girl”. I would be lying if I didn’t
observe that this growing permissiveness coincides with the laxity of the
culture. Most of our hottest, youngest authors, directors and artists achieve
this status at age forty. Forty? That is late-middle-age! In the 1960s, most of
The New York Times’ best writers were in their 20s.
“Twenty-Seven is old.” Another character informs
Frances. These words were ringing in my ears for hours after the film ended. Frances Ha is the new film by Noah
Baumbach, a man who probably would have liked to be making films in the 1960s.
His previous films include Kicking and Screaming (1995), The Squid and the Whale (2005) and Margot at the Wedding (2007). Funnily enough, this is his least overtly autobiographical work. He has
co-written it with his current muse Greta Gerwig, who also stars in the film. Her
performance is one of the year’s best.
Not much happens; Frances spends her time monopolizing
every situation she’s in to disastrous effect. Although not everything is her
fault. Things begin to unravel when her best friend and roommate Sophie (Mickey
Sumner) declares she’s moving in with her boyfriend. This leads to a briny
drift to initiate in their friendship. We see this happen to people all the
time in their twenties, but no matter how sagacious we’ve become to it, undergoing
it still sucks. She manages to ignore most advice from friends, her parents (played
by Gerwig’s actual parents) and Colleen, her boss at the dance studio (played by
Charlotte d’Amboise, one Broadway’s greatest dancers of the last 30 years).
From that perspective, Frances Ha is an exquisite examination of that kind of person, in
that kind of situation, in this current era of human history. The non-plot
complications that follow have both a truthful power and comedic absurdity. But
it is always cinematic. For example, when Frances moves into a new apartment
she celebrates with an impromptu street ballet to David Bowie's "Modern
Love". This moment is borrowed from Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang (1986), a detail that adds a cinematic phosphorescence that
woos.
The film has been shot digitally on the fly. This is
obvious. It, like all of Mr Baumbach’s work, is in the tradition of the French
New Wave, though tradition might be a stretch here. The insinuations to Francois
Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard are so omnipresent that one can't decry them sheer
aesthetic oddities. In the manner of early cinema verite, the black-and-white
cinematography (by Sam Levy) induces that of Raoul Coutard’s work on Jules and Jim (1962) and The Soft Skin (1964) (Truffaut) and Vivre Sa Vie (1962) and Band of Outsiders (1964) (Godard). The agitated
editing, which often omits anticipated plot turns for the sake of a vibrant cadence,
also recalls those directors.
In a way, it is Masculine-Feminine
(1966), but in New York. The movie also
cracks Eric Rohmer in its concurrences and unsullied romantic conversations. I guess
this could go on forever. Many have incited Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979) as an
influence. But what many are overlooking is that the film is a natural
cinematic progression – rather than a gesture – from arguably the best film of the
last ten years: Alex Ross Perry’s The
Color Wheel (2012).
Frances Ha doesn’t reach that’s film’s degree of cinematic magnitude,
though no film does. Somehow, Mr Baumbach has managed to doctor all this into
one of his best films. It is wry yet affectionate, unrestricted yet elegant, blue
yet cheerful. And in Ms Gerwig, he has found a worthy cinematic mast to sail
with.
