Movie review: Frances Ha - wildly inappropriate

Who is Frances Ha? We’re not sure she knows herself.

Frances Ha will be a difficult movie to sit through for many Pakistanis. I emerged from the cinema in London relieved the film was over but appreciative of its new take on the life of a young woman trying to make it in New York, to put it extremely simply. I also fought back the urge to comb her hair into a clean ponytail. That was a strangled reaction from the socially conditioned Pakistani female in me even though I am not particularly well groomed myself.

Frances (Greta Gerwig) is a wide-eyed 27-year-old college graduate aiming to get a permanent place on staff at her dance company. As the movie opens, we see her living with her best friend Sophie (Mickey Summer). They tell each other they love each other, a lot, they drink beer on the windowsill and snuggle in bed. “Tell me the story of us,” Frances asks her; we feel it is bedtime and the mother is tucking in her child. At first I mistook the intimacy of their relationship as semi-homo erotic but as the film unfolded, I realised Sophie was just Frances’s support lifeline.



As soon as the characters are set up, Frances’s life starts to go belly up. Her boyfriend breaks up with her when she wobbles on moving in with him because she wants to renew her lease with Sophie. But she comes home to discover Sophie has decided to move out. For the rest of the movie we have to painfully watch her figure out living arrangements given that she can’t make rent and the dance company job falls through.

In cringe-worthy scene after another, we follow her trying to gain some semblance of cohesiveness in her life. Does she know what she wants? This involves a random trip to Paris, taking up with a narcissist for a space in his apartment, going back to her alma mater for a summer job and sleeping in a dorm to get by.

The plot runs along from one disaster to another, so don’t watch it if you like some semblance of progression to a neat ending. Frances Ha (directed by Noah Baumbach) flirts with the genre of mumblecore films, a sub-genre of American cinema, which prefers natural-sounding dialogue, low budgets and amateur actors. You won’t notice that it is shot in black and white, a choice that actually gives the film great character and is so reminiscent of Woody Allen’s work.

And Frances seems like a modern version of the characters neurotic Jewish New Yorkers Woody Allen has played. She is awkward, says the wrong thing, is self-obsessed but in an endearing innocent way. We forgive her because she is young, a hipster, lost. She doesn’t know when to stop leaving messages even though the person she is calling obviously doesn’t want to talk to her. We feel embarrassed for her. She runs blocks to an ATM when she runs out of cash for a dinner she insists on paying for. Her date lets her pay. We are not comfortable with how he treats her.

Much of the chaos is balanced out by her honesty that charms us but the very next moment makes us recoil in horror because we can’t be so close to something so socially inept. Take this scene from a hellish dinner she finds herself at:

“What do you do,” asks the man to her right.

“Er... it’s a little hard to explain,” she replies.

“Because what you do is complicated?”

“Err...because...I don’t... really do it.”

The underlying theme is friendship — can Frances learn to be on her own without Sophie who has grown faster out of the relationship? But this spirals out neatly into other rich veins touching on change, how oddly enough men still treat women with misogynistic undertones and get away with it, being young and clueless but wanting to figure life out on your own no matter how scary it is. The expertly written script carries all of this through with snippets of observations that Pakistani women will love. “Patch is the kind of guy,” declares Frances, “who buys a black leather couch and is like, I lurve it.” I’m not sure I love her character, but I get that it’s finally a film that shows a young woman without makeup and untouched by the conditioning that society foists on us.

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, August 25^th, 2013.

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