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In a media culture that’s deeply saturated with reactions to millenial disenchantment, from HBO’s “Girls” to a couple hundred male-who-can’t-grow-up dramedies, “Frances Ha” feels like an artistic breaking point, a seemingly unparalleled gem that captures the zeitgeist, yet imbues it with a timelessness that will help it last the ages.
Directed by Noah Baumbach and starring Greta Gerwig (two talents who co-wrote the script and are also a real-life couple), the movie blends its maestro’s cinephilia with its leading lady’s mumblecore roots, resulting in a chatty, yet poignant, tale that’s of this moment and many others too.
Filmed in black-and-white, and thus calling to mind the high-contrast glory of Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” (a surefire influence), this New York character study follows Frances (Gerwig), an aspiring dancer, as she struggles to live on next to nothing in the wake of her “breakup” with best friend and roommate Sophie (Mickey Sumner), who takes a big adult step by settling into a committed relationship. Frances moves from apartment to apartment, and her migrations are gloriously scored to an array of buoyant tunes, from banjo music to 1980s standards.
Both irrepressibly lovable and frustratingly self-defeating (she wants a dance career, but won’t take a desk job to keep her fed in the meantime), the character is a beautiful contradiction, and a fanciful, yet highly familiar, poster girl for the 20- and 30-somethings who wrestle regularly with malaise, malcontent, entitlement, and other results of growing up in a mercurial first-world society.
If these descriptors imply at all that “Frances Ha” is shallow, fear not: The film is a model of how to make a talky film and actually have it speak volumes, rather than vanish into the ether with all the other loquacious comedies. When Frances worriedly tells a waiter she’s “not an adult yet” because she doesn’t have a credit card, the line feels less like a gag than a generational gut-punch. And merged with Baumbach’s breezy, New Wave-y sensibilities, it all jells together into something quite magical.
Frances Ha
R
Three-and-a-half reels out of four
Opens tomorrow at the Ritz Five
Recommended Rental
Lore
NR
Available Tuesday
A politically-charged critical favorite, Cate Shortland’s “Lore” tells the tale of a group of Germans who fend for themselves after their SS-soldier father and Nazi-cheerleading mother are cpatured at the end of WWII. The titular teen (Saskia Rosendahl) leads her siblings through their ravaged homeland and finds her beliefs challenged along with her life. A riveting drama about atonement, ideals, and coming of age in the direst of circumstances.
Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview.com.
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