people and places
by
Douglas Messerli
Noah
Baumbach And Greta Gerwig (screenplay) Noah Baumbach (director) Frances Ha /
2013
Noah
Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s (she collaborated on the screenplay, and is the
central actor in the work) Frances Ha, somewhat in imitation of the
French New Wave films, is a film less a plotted than a series of personal
encounters between the major character, Frances Halladay (Gerwig) has with
others, many centering around shared apartments.
Yes, one could summarize these “encounters”
and link them one by one into a sort of plot, but it would lead you nowhere except
the different neighborhoods to which Frances moves after her best friend Sophie
Levee (Mickey Sumner), with whom she attended Vassar, decides to move out of
their Brooklyn apartment to her favorite Manhattan neighborhood in Tribeca.
Her abandonment by Sophie, which is
further extended when her friend returns to her for former boyfriend Patch (Patrick
Heusinger), whom they both make fun of, but who, we later discover is a most
handsome and successful man in the film, who eventually gets transferred by his
company to head operations in Japan, taking the rather mixed-up Sophie with
him.
Others of Frances’ friends describe Sophie,
who previously worked at Random House, as a highly talented and a quite
beautiful woman; to me she is rather plain-looking and a kind of disaster of a
being, particularly when she gets drunk, which we witness when the two accidentally
hook up again at Vassar, to whom the now rather well-to-do Sophie and her
husband have just a significant contribution, while Frances, having no money to
survive, is temporarily now works as a “pourer” (doling out he wine and other drinks)
and a part-time publicist’s assistant who hands out fliers about the school to
would-be students.
That evening Sophie crawls into the single
bed with her friend, revealing through tears that she hates Japan and had a
still-born which she otherwise would have aborted. She has also refused to
attend the funeral for Patch’s grandfather in New York City. As Frances has
earlier stated, they are a bit like lesbians who have been together long enough
that they no longer have sex. Yet, it is apparent that these women are strongly
heterosexual.
The next morning, as soon as sobered up, Sophie
slips away, leaving a message that she has to hurry to New York to attend a
funeral. And we are not surprised when she, soon after, marries Patch (real
character name, Reade Krause) and returns to Japan with him.
Frances, a would-be dancer, still performs
as an apprentice in a company for whom she works, hoping to eventually be part
of the corps de ballet. But we know that will never happen, in part because she
is somewhat of a klutz in both her body and her language. Several times
throughout the film the camera catches her in extremely awkward positions or literally
falling into space. When she attends a dinner party by wealthy acquaintances
where she is asked to dance, she carries out her maneuvers with little grace.
When she is told, very gently by the dance
company’s director, that they will be unable to use her the special Christmas
show, Frances is quite devastated, because now she cannot even pay the (discounted) portion of the rent of her new
Chinatown digs she shares with two friendly males, Lev Shapiro (Adam Driver)
and Benji (Michael Zegen).
A Christmas trip home to Sacramento
perhaps explains some of her innate awkwardness. In the loving scenes of holiday
celebration, we hear the various family conversation, each interrupting each,
while her sister’s and brother’s children race through house, an uncle or some
other relative playing, with great gusto, a trumpet. Despite the chaos,
however, it is also a joyous occasion, filled with familiar laughter. Yet, so exhausting
is this scene, just to assimilate, that it literally puts the viewer into a
kind of dizziness.
Soon after, tired of hearing so many of
her friends and acquaintances reminiscences of their times in Paris and elsewhere
in Europe, Frances maxes out her credit card with a trip to Paris—reminding one
a bit of the errant Toni Collette’s trip to Bali in Muriel’s Wedding—where
she stays in a pied-à-terre owned by the couple who organized the
previous dinner party she attended.
Yet Frances clearly does not take in any
of the beautiful sites of the city, eating alone in small outdoor cafes while
attempting to call two friends she has in Paris, who call back only as she speeds
away, after three days, to the airport. We can only gather it was a convenient
silence on their part.
At another meeting with the dance company
director, she is now told that she cannot even remain as an apprentice, but is
offered a temporary secretarial job in the office, and is encouraged to return
to some of her own choreography done in conjunction with children.
The hurt and frustrated Frances rejects
those possibilities and scurries away to Vassar to work in the roles I’ve
described above.
Yet, by film’s end, we see her back in Manhattan,
working as the dance company’s secretary and organizing a children’s ballet
corps for a new work she has choreographed.
The premier is well-attended by
friends, and praised highly by the dance director for whom she now works. But
even here, Frances clumsily faces in another direction, spotting, as she tells
the director, her very best friend, Sophie.
Her former housemate Benj visits her in
her new apartment, clearly in search of a new relationship with the previously “undatable”
Frances.
In the very last scene, we watch her
write out her full name, Frances Halladay, on a piece of paper for her new post
box. But as she attempts to slip it into the slot it is too long, and she cuts
off the ending, leaving only Frances Ha, a kind celebratory whoop of joy for
all she has survived and for the new life she now perceives facing her in the
future.
Frances Ha, although filled with
noisy conversation and other interchanges of dialogue, in the end, is a quiet
movie about the inner life and ultimate resilience of its hero, after her
passive flops in her friend’s apartments and, at one point, even upon the
sidewalk. For Frances does eventually become a kind of dancer, spinning through
life the way the greatest of ballerinas might not have even imagined.
Los
Angeles, June 21, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (June 2020).
No comments:
Post a Comment