Frances Ha
If you surrender to this dance film’s quiet humour, the entitlement and artistic pretensions become its biggest strengths.
As long as you remember to laugh, Frances Ha is a tolerable experience. Forget the “ha ha” and Frances Ha is beyond unbearable.
I found this an odd and often frustrating truth, but it’s what makes Noah Baumbach’s new movie a success because the very same could be said about life: Forget to laugh, and the whole experience is nothing but heartache.
Of course, these meditations come after the fact, in the slow regurgitation of the film’s black and white images featuring Greta Gerwig as our title character, Frances.
A dance apprentice who believed she would one day conquer the world with her brave new moves, Frances is now in her late 20s and facing imminent unemployment. This is the moment where compromise would seem undeniable. Yet Frances decides to pursue her dream to create, regardless of how ridiculous her ambition has become.
In America, this is heroic. On the shrink’s couch, it’s Peter Pan Syndrome. And in real life, it’s just plain irritating.
Playing unaffected with affectation is one of Gerwig’s trademarks. As the heiress to Chloë Sevigny’s quirky sex-appeal, Gerwig has the same MENSA centrefold charm — a certain vacancy that speaks to a background of oblivious affluence as well as composed self-awareness.
We get the sense Frances has lived in a privileged soap bubble her whole life, forever floating around without making a dent in anyone’s life — including her own. But now, that bubble is about to burst.
Baumbach and Gerwig take turns huffing and puffing plot elements in her direction, blowing her fragile craft back and forth across the frame through comic interludes featuring a variety of similarly afflicted, and equally irritating young people.
A few examples include Sophie (Mickey Sumner), Frances’s best friend who has a real job at a publishing house and a boyfriend who works on Wall Street. Sophie is about to move on with her life and tie the knot with preppy Patch (Patrick Heusinger), but she seems disappointed life isn’t an episode of Sex and the City.
Then there’s Lev (Adam Driver), a rich, latter-day Leonard Cohen who calls himself an artist and picks up different women every night with his not-so-unique blend of five o’clock shadow and vintage motorcycle chic.
Lev thinks everything is kind of funny, and tries to tease Frances into looking at the world as he does: Through a kaleidoscope of colourful opportunity and limited consequence.
Rounding out the playpen is Benji (Michael Zegen), Lev’s roommate who feels a spiritual connection to Frances because both of them are stuck in a similar bubble of underemployment. Benji survives by asking his parents for money, and amuses himself by writing spec scripts for Saturday Night Live that never get accepted.
There’s an unspoken conceit of entitlement that makes these people entirely unattractive as they waffle around, unwilling to take a job that’s not cool enough to impress their vapid friends — and it’s a large part of what makes Frances Ha unwatchable.
Yet, when you remember to laugh at these self-absorbed, half-baked intellectuals desperately searching for some sense of meaning, everything about Baumbach and Gerwig’s script falls into place because it sets up the generational divide between the classic work of Woody Allen, and the derivative, pretentious crap created by the next generation.
Allen’s characters often meandered around Manhattan without real purpose. But they gurgled about German philosophy. They pondered the ramifications of personal responsibility. In other words, the wordy blather was actually interesting.
The dialogue in Frances Ha feels like it came from a gum wrapper, an almost random articulation of 20-something observations punctuated by the non-word “undateable.”
Of course, they all think they are very witty as they tool around in the tepid intellectual tub to the point of pruniness, which only makes you want to slap them.
So you have to laugh at their unfathomable narcissism because frustrating as it is, this movie has its cute moments. They tend to arrive at the breaking point, just as you feel an urge to write off the whole movie as pedantic drivel, because Gerwig and Baumbach deliver an element of honesty that can’t be denied.
They take a long look in the mirror, and while they try to exaggerate the good with a wink of denial, they also let us take a tour of the weak, ugly and altogether entitled side of a generation that never heard the word “no.”
It’s not pretty and it’s frequently tedious, but laughing puts this modern-day tragedy into perspective as it redraws the line between heroism and human comedy.