Elusive search for stardom
FILM REVIEW by Don Perlgut. Director Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha is one of the most original and delightful movies of the year.
Filmed in black and white, it bows to history while being in the “moment” and is the result of a deep, creative collaboration between a Jewish film director and his non-Jewish girlfriend.
Baumbach is widely regarded as being the inheritor of Woody Allen’s mantle of New York Jewish comedic angst (both grew up in Brooklyn).
Baumbach’s Frances Ha star, muse and co-writer is Greta Gerwig, who recently starred in Arthur and in Allen’s To Rome with Love.
Gerwig brings an assured sense to Frances’ ungainly physical style; she is on screen for virtually the entire film and her performance is delightful.
Frances works on the fringes of a professional dance company as an apprentice dancer who never quite makes it, lurching from one personal disaster to another. She is quickly running out of money, unlike her unstressed trust-fund-supported friends.
“The only people who can afford to be artists in New York are rich,” Frances wisely observes.
Frances even falls out with her roommate and best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner). Her one attempt at competing in this world of money and privilege – an impulsive weekend spent in a luxury flat in Paris – turns out to be disastrous as she sleeps most of the time and cannot connect with her friends.
Eventually Frances can no longer pay rent, and resorts to visiting her parents at “home” in Sacramento, California.
These touching scenes are all the more poignant because Gerwig’s parents – Gordon and Christine Gerwig – play her movie parents.
One of Frances’ last residences is a dormitory at Vassar College (which Baumbach attended), where she works a summer job serving food at alumni reunions.
Frances Ha has de facto “chapter” headings – simple white font on black backgrounds, Woody Allen-style, each identifying one of Frances’ residences.
It’s not surprising that Time magazine calls Frances Ha a “Millennial Annie Hall”, but it does have a complex set of antecedents including Allen’s Manhattan (romantic New York also shot in black and white) and the gen Y television series Girls (the film includes Adam Driver from that series, here as Lev Shapiro).
As enjoyable as it is, Frances Ha is unlikely to have the same impact as Annie Hall. And as for the film’s title, you will have to wait until the final scene for an explanation.
PHOTO of Greta Gerwig in Frances Ha.
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