Frances Ha

Bea says:  We went to see this mostly because it looked the least heavy of the two films on at the Glasgow Film Theatre on Monday night  (we were celebrating a birthday after all).  The synopsis sounded OK – it sounded like a chick flick actually.  

I hadn’t seen Noah Baumbach’s previous work, but the notes given out before the screening suggested that he had some serious fans and was well considered critically.

And it wasn’t long into the film that I thought about something I’d read about in the Metro recently – the Bechdel test, which asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women who talk about something other than a man.  I’d been struck by how few films pass the test (the Metro had rated some notable recent films), including a number of films written, produced and/or directed by women (and apparently about half of those that do pass only do so because the women talk about marriage and babies instead of men).  I think Frances Ha would pass the test – just about. 

There is a lot of talk about men (and some about marriage and babies), but there is also talk about careers, mistakes, successes, dreams and life in general.  It was good to see a film where the men were peripheral to the two central characters – I can’t remember when, or if, I’d ever seen that before.

I also fairly quickly after the start of the film thought about the TV series The Girls, which I have never seen actually (not sure it’s available yet on Freeview in the UK) but have read and seen things about, and I suspect this film has some similarities – the lives of current 20-something women, and their experiences of life and sex. 

These days I am a 40-something woman, but I remember those years like they were just yesterday, and this film rang very true indeed, particularly so in its portrayal of close female friendships and the post-university years.  It’s well written, well-shot in black and white, well acted and, crucially, well directed.

I’ll be catching up with Bambach’s back catalogue and looking out with interest for his next collaboration with Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote this.

****

Cecil says: What I liked most of all about Frances Ha is that it told a story without needing a conventional beginning, middle and end. It was just a chunk out of someone’s life; more than a snapshot because it lasted about a year or so, but we enter into Frances’s life as she has a play-fight with her friend Sophie, and we leave her inserting her name into her new apartment letter box, as the next stage in her life begins.

For the first half hour or so I wasn’t sure about this film. It felt a bit like an episode of Friends, with an arty edge to their lives, and maybe a touch of Billy Elliott, with the dancing school and lessons being key to large parts of Frances’s life. But by the end, I didn’t feel the need to compare it to any other film (certainly not to Annie Hall, as one reviewer has done); it felt like it had a place in its own right.

A couple of small things I wondered about: this film is in black and white, but I didn’t even notice that until a scene about half way through when Frances is at her parents’ house (played by the actress’s real parents).

Suddenly her Mum talks about a red baking tray and a green angel for the Christmas tree. I guess the director had some reason for throwing in the colour thing, but it just left me wondering why.

And then the discussion about Paris at that oh-so-awkward dinner party. I guess we are meant to think of the couple who have an apartment in ‘the sixth’ as being pretentious because nobody surely at a dinner party in New York would refer to the 6^th without adding the explanatory ‘arrondissement’.

And I don’t want to be a pretentious nit-picker myself (well, actually, I do) but as someone who has lived in Paris, you’d not get a beautiful corner apartment in the rue Vaugirard with a primary school playground right underneath your window, so, again, you kind of wonder why the director did that, too.

Overall, though, I liked this film.

It reminded me a lot of my own awkward time at aged 27, when I too was not quite sure where I wanted to be and things were just slowly sorting themselves out in a direction I’d be happy with.

Because of the way the film leaves Frances with no ‘ending’, we just don’t know what direction her life may take next, but there are signs that things are sorting themselves out for her.

So it even has a feel-good factor at the end as well.

****