Frances Ha is the perfect title for a film that feels unfinished. I use unfinished as praise here; I’m quite sure Noah Baumbach wanted the feel of the pic to have neither standard start nor finish. Title character Frances (Greta Gerwig) is amiably delusional. [read: loveable fuck-up] The male version of this type of human sits on a couch all day drinking beer and playing video games. The female version is quite a bit more interesting; Frances frolics about the lovely black & white Woody Allen version of New York City, sabotaging relationships and making bad choices.
Sophie (Mickey Summer) and Frances are roomies and best buds to start the film. They visualize wonderful futures for one another. Sophie complements Frances well, and she has to because somebody’s gotta earn the bucks if you live in NYC. Frances is a bad dancer. I suppose that’s unfair – she’s better than I am, but her personal tribute to “gangly” makes her nowhere near talented enough to hold down a decent paying dancing job. That doesn’t stop Frances from burning all her bridges along these lines.
Frances turns down a moving-in-with-boyfriend opportunity out of loyalty to Sophie. This is a mistake. Frances has hitched her wagon to an asexual partner instead of her sexual one. Speaking of which, I kept wondering, “What is up with Frances’ sexuality?” We see her linked to three different men, having sex with none of them during the several-months-long period this film covers. We see her in bed with Sophie, but that’s quickly dismissed as friendship. Sophie hates it when Frances wears socks to bed – fantastic, we’ve already gone beyond the sexual stage and leapt straight to the veteran couple 
stage. Frances hints attraction to Lev (Adam Driver) and kids about a relationship with Benji (Michael Zegen), but unlike when men use these actions as precursors to sex, Frances seems to view them the other way. Maybe she’s just too goofy to have a sexual relationship.
And if this film actually told a story or didn’t feel like a collection of PG-rated voyeur sessions, I might just begin a paragraph with something other than, “Frances is.”
Frances isn’t actually grown up enough to take care of herself on her own. Nowhere is this more evident than in two subplots – one in which she returns to college as a live-in RA when she runs out of NYC apartments. Others might see this as a huge humiliation. Frances wears the social demotion as a badge of pride. I think this is what we love about Greta Gerwig here – there is plenty of humility, but no outward shame. It’s a hard combo to master, but one that is extremely endearing to the audience. The coup de grace of her polished imbecility comes when she feels bullied at a dinner party and decides on the spot to fly to France to visit an unimportant character. Watching this film becomes a sickeningly humerous sort of schadenfreude — except the pleasure we take is more sympathetic than mean-spirited. Frances isn’t quite up to effective human being level yet, but she’s just soooooo close. And you really do want her to succeed even through she just hasn’t a prayer on her own.
Frances Ha is a tour de force for Greta Gerwig. This is one of those queen-making performances like Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde or Amy Adams in Enchanted. Greta so becomes this endearing, self-deluded screw-up that you’d obviously and magically fall in love with her … if she weren’t a self-deluded screw-up, that is. Were Greta a tad more attractive, one might even imagine the Reese Witherspoon-type career to follow. Alas, Hollywood is cruel. The remake would invariably star Katherine Heigl, have PG-13 sex, a happy ending, and none of the charm.
Frances lives tall in the City
Immune from all that is gritty
Her naïveté immense
Tale ends in suspense
Still waiting? Alas, what a pity
Rated R, 86 Minutes
D: Noah Baumbach
W: Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig
Genre: Disillusioned
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Loveable ditzes
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: The practical
