Sunday Review: Frances Ha

Indefinite self-definition

By Jonathan Price

Who or what is Frances Ha? That is the question Noah Baumbach’s recent film keeps asking and refusing to answer as its central character, Frances Halladay (Greta Gerwig, also its co-writer), moves through a recurring series of relationships and apartments trying to find her way mostly in New York City. And so the film is an attempt to define the amorphous group of young singles from, say, 22 to 30, who have graduated from college and have a series of friends and locations, but are essentially still in limbo or a second latency period.
    But Frances’s search for the self is, for the most part, charming, as she capers about New York City, practicing some dance steps and fake fighting with a friend on a walkway in Central Park. In one scene she runs frenetically in search of an ATM to treat a companion at a restaurant (she had promised; he offers to pay), finding one at a distance and developing a limp on her way back. A comic, rueful sequence but also a testimony to Frances’s integrity and spirit.
    The film offers definitions of its central self in terms of a series of locales and relations; in fact each of its black-and-white styled segments begins with a new address, which marks this pilgrim’s progress. In the first one she is living with her college roommate and best-friend Sophie, who seems to verge on a lesbian crush, though ultimately is really just her best friend. Frances can’t quite make the rent, which is the primary plot motivation for this series of peregrinations. One of her “locales” is a post office box as she spends some summer months as a kind of woodsy counselor at her alma mater, Vassar. (The film is occasionally mildly autobiographical: Gerwig attended Barnard, but Baumbach went to Vassar; Vassar, however, has a conveniently rural setting and serves as a pastoral retreat to the past.)
    In another move, also a retreat, she moves home to her parents middle-class house in Sacramento. At one point in the film, Frances claims poverty, but her roommates note that she is really not economically at the bottom of the ladder; and her series of well-heeled friends and relatives essentially establish her as a mildly stressed middle-class bohemian. Nevertheless she has reached a kind of mild triumph and station of growth when she can afford her own apartment and is beginning to choreograph others’ dance routines. In the final sequence she establishes this maturation of self by inserting her name (Frances Ha, truncated from “Halladay” to fit) into the mailbox.

Greta Gerwig

    Though perhaps the characteristic of this age group in films is a search for romance and success, not nearly in that order, Frances is repeatedly labeled by an eligible male friend, “undatable.” This is essentially a comic designation, for Frances is attractive and intriguing, though continually seems to elude major interest or commitment, just as she can’t quite find a permanent job or pay all of her share of the rent. She is not completely formed but shows promise.
    Frances’s evanescence or search touches lightly on Paris, where she spends a few days on a lark taking advantage of some American acquaintances’ pied-a-terre that she heard about at a dinner party the night before. The Parisian jaunt is an accurate gauge of the film’s ambivalence. How can a person so stressed for money and unable to pay her share of various rent arrangements afford a two-day stay in Paris? She can’t. She charges it on a credit card she just received in the mail. Who does she know in Paris? The only friend isn’t answering her phone. How does she feel? A bit disappointed, lonely, and sad. Yet, despite appearances, it is not a disaster, just part of the process. Frances is much more saddened when she hears of Sophie’s engagement to Patch, a trader at Goldman Sachs, and their move to Japan; but Sophie never deserts Frances, doesn’t marry the fiancé, and returns to the U.S., where she appears to have a substantial job at a major publisher.

This film marks one of several by Baumbach that are essentially character studies, particularly of eccentric characters who are not quite loveable. Perhaps the most famous of these is The Squid and the Whale, in which both divorcing parents are a bit troubling or nasty, though the film is essentially a portrait of the emergence from adolescence that the parents’ split occasions in the children. In Greenberg two years ago the central character (Ben Stiller) was just recovering from a mental-health hospitalization and trying to recapture his distant past in Los Angeles while house sitting for his far more successful brother. We watched Greenberg disintegrate in a series of conversations with people who might offer him friendship or affection, but he did not quite proceed to self-destruction. Gerwig played second fiddle in that film, as his occasional girlfriend Dolores. None of these characters seem gainfully employed, though they are conveniently surrounded (and supported) by members of the upper middle class.
    Though these films might not have clear direction or message, they offer a kind of honesty and directness that the typical Hollywood film lacks—especially because their development and their outlines are unpredictable. Frances Ha has the charm, originality, and honesty that a more typical Hollywood romantic comedy or summer blockbuster special effects film lack.
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Copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Price

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