"Frances Ha" (2013)

Director Noah Baumbach has made a career out of telling stories about prickly, selfish, at times highly unlikable, characters. In Frances Ha, Greta Gerwig, Baumbach's muse he discovered for his last film Greenberg and who co-wrote Frances Ha's script with Baumbach, takes center stage as Frances Halliday, a twenty-seven year old with a failing dance career and barely enough money to make rent. While Frances watches everyone around her grow up, she staunchly refuses to, partly because she doesn't want to but also because she has no idea what growing up even requires. Frances is a film filled with people who ought to have figured out their lives by this point in their lives but haven't, and at its heart, it's a film about youthful listlessness and the awkward in-between phase separating college and thirty-something adulthood.

Frances is stuck in the past, longing for her college days. Her roommate and self-proclaimed best friend since college Sofie (Mickey Sumner) has formed a strangely co-dependent relationship with Frances. The film is, at its core, a lovely treatise on female friendship and how old friendships evolve in the face of change. Their bond is put to the test when Sofie starts getting her shit together, getting a better apartment, creating a stable romantic long-term romantic relationship, and obtaining a nice job. This causes Frances to flounder and take a hard look at her life even as she extensively goes out of her way to avoid taking responsibility for herself. In deed, the film is essentially a series of episodes in which Frances goes out of her way to make an even bigger mess of her life and further prove her immaturity. The choices she makes with her life become highly untenable and desperate, demonstrating the lengths Frances consciously and unconsciously goes to in order to stay childlike and unchanged.

Baumbach shoots the film in a gorgeous black and white, reminiscent of Woody Allen's Manhattan and many French New Wave films (stylistically, visually and musically the film is highly indebted to Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, among others). Frances even recklessly goes to Paris at one point, creating a stark contrast between the old romantic French classics she loves and the real world. Frances has bought into the novel romanticism of these films and uses it as a filter for judging and understanding her world. Note the title: Frances Ha. France and then a laugh; as if the film is poking holes in the myths formed by French cinema.

Though Frances is a difficult character and one frequently intentionally hard to sympathize with, she's still relatable. Frances is a product of our time; a Millenial struggling to exist in and come to terms with a world which has privileged and coddled her for so long.

Grade: ★★★★