This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/jul/25/frances-ha-baumbach-gerwig-review
The article has changed 4 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.
| Version 0 | Version 1 |
|---|---|
| Frances Ha – review | Frances Ha – review |
| (2 months later) | |
| Noah Baumbach's new comedy is a good-looking New York indie shot in black and white; but for the mobile phones, it looks like it could have come out at the same time as Woody Allen's Manhattan or even Godard's Breathless. This is the indulgent study of a young woman called Frances, played by Greta Gerwig, and both movie and star have warmth and watchability, though the intense hipness is sometimes not worn lightly. There is, in particular, one bizarre scene in which our heroine, late at night in the subway, takes certain measures because no bathroom is at hand. It's clearly supposed to be ditsy, daring and boho. She looks like she should be taken into care for her own safety. | Noah Baumbach's new comedy is a good-looking New York indie shot in black and white; but for the mobile phones, it looks like it could have come out at the same time as Woody Allen's Manhattan or even Godard's Breathless. This is the indulgent study of a young woman called Frances, played by Greta Gerwig, and both movie and star have warmth and watchability, though the intense hipness is sometimes not worn lightly. There is, in particular, one bizarre scene in which our heroine, late at night in the subway, takes certain measures because no bathroom is at hand. It's clearly supposed to be ditsy, daring and boho. She looks like she should be taken into care for her own safety. |
| Frances is entering a quarter-life crisis: she is a nice and eager-to-please person, a trainee dancer whose quirky, jokey personality conceals a growing cloudcover of depression, and she can hardly hear or say her own name without uttering a little self-deprecatory laugh. By co-devising this film with his partner and star, Gerwig, Baumbach fuses his own recurring and very male themes of career anxiety, social competition and life disappointment with Gerwig's very different personality, a looser, gentler ambient style which does not prickle with barbs and zingers, and which puts the optimism back in. | Frances is entering a quarter-life crisis: she is a nice and eager-to-please person, a trainee dancer whose quirky, jokey personality conceals a growing cloudcover of depression, and she can hardly hear or say her own name without uttering a little self-deprecatory laugh. By co-devising this film with his partner and star, Gerwig, Baumbach fuses his own recurring and very male themes of career anxiety, social competition and life disappointment with Gerwig's very different personality, a looser, gentler ambient style which does not prickle with barbs and zingers, and which puts the optimism back in. |
| Frances Ha grew on me. It of course resembles that touchstone of contemporary cool, Lena Dunham's HBO TV comedy Girls, in the locations, the scene in which the befuddled single girl goes for a visit back home with her affectionately portrayed parents who are of course bankrolling her big-city adventure, and also in the appearance of that show's supporting star, the lugubrious Adam Driver, who plays Lev, a slightly preposterous artist with weird, faintly pugnacious and yet unreadable mannerisms. In some ways Baumbach has repositioned himself in the comedy space that Dunham has opened up, and away from the theatre of menopausal disillusionment. | Frances Ha grew on me. It of course resembles that touchstone of contemporary cool, Lena Dunham's HBO TV comedy Girls, in the locations, the scene in which the befuddled single girl goes for a visit back home with her affectionately portrayed parents who are of course bankrolling her big-city adventure, and also in the appearance of that show's supporting star, the lugubrious Adam Driver, who plays Lev, a slightly preposterous artist with weird, faintly pugnacious and yet unreadable mannerisms. In some ways Baumbach has repositioned himself in the comedy space that Dunham has opened up, and away from the theatre of menopausal disillusionment. |
| The resulting film does not have the bite of Dunham's work, but the Baumbach/Gerwig combination offers something distinctive: a soromance instead of the usual romcom. If Gerwig's Frances loves anyone, it is her best friend, Sophie (Mickey Sumner), a laidback woman with Annie Leibowitz's style in hair and glasses and a prestigious career in view – unlike Frances, who struggles as a precariously employed "apprentice" in a dance company. | The resulting film does not have the bite of Dunham's work, but the Baumbach/Gerwig combination offers something distinctive: a soromance instead of the usual romcom. If Gerwig's Frances loves anyone, it is her best friend, Sophie (Mickey Sumner), a laidback woman with Annie Leibowitz's style in hair and glasses and a prestigious career in view – unlike Frances, who struggles as a precariously employed "apprentice" in a dance company. |
| Frances and Sophie live together, share jokes and secrets, and are much closer than Frances is to her notional boyfriend: that relationship has been tested by the issue of getting cats, rather as in Miranda July's The Future. Suddenly, mysteriously, everything goes wrong at once for Frances; and as the end of her 20s are in sight, it is as if her life plans have turned out to be a fragile house of cards, and a sudden gust of wind from an open window has blown them down. | Frances and Sophie live together, share jokes and secrets, and are much closer than Frances is to her notional boyfriend: that relationship has been tested by the issue of getting cats, rather as in Miranda July's The Future. Suddenly, mysteriously, everything goes wrong at once for Frances; and as the end of her 20s are in sight, it is as if her life plans have turned out to be a fragile house of cards, and a sudden gust of wind from an open window has blown them down. |
| Poor Frances has to endure many humiliations, including a temporary working stint at her old college, where she has to sleep in the dorm. Interestingly, the movie is loosely structured around Frances's lack of a permanent place to live; the various addresses where she's staying flash up as intertitles, deadpanning the itinerant chaos at the heart of her life, and the issue is to provide the final explanation of the film's title. Nowhere to stay means no status, and it means no base from which mature relationships can be cultivated. And time is running out – that unmentionable fear. At 27, she probably hoped for more, and to her mortification, she is repeatedly told that she looks older than her age. | Poor Frances has to endure many humiliations, including a temporary working stint at her old college, where she has to sleep in the dorm. Interestingly, the movie is loosely structured around Frances's lack of a permanent place to live; the various addresses where she's staying flash up as intertitles, deadpanning the itinerant chaos at the heart of her life, and the issue is to provide the final explanation of the film's title. Nowhere to stay means no status, and it means no base from which mature relationships can be cultivated. And time is running out – that unmentionable fear. At 27, she probably hoped for more, and to her mortification, she is repeatedly told that she looks older than her age. |
| She has kind of a moment with Lev's roommate, Benji (Michael Zegen) – tellingly, a would-be comedy writer – in which they cheerfully hail each other as "undateable", but this is nowhere near being a romance, and in fact as far as the structure of the film is concerned, it is irrelevant compared to her friendship with Sophie. But that, too, is subservient in importance to the film's sense that nothing in relationships can be perceived very clearly, but that things are in general liable to work out fine. Something in her attitude to life, a kind of residual positive momentum, combined with the simple condition of being young, carries her forward. There is a nice scene (accompanied by a Bowie track) in which she does an extended jazz-run down a New York street, evidently trying to catch a bus. | She has kind of a moment with Lev's roommate, Benji (Michael Zegen) – tellingly, a would-be comedy writer – in which they cheerfully hail each other as "undateable", but this is nowhere near being a romance, and in fact as far as the structure of the film is concerned, it is irrelevant compared to her friendship with Sophie. But that, too, is subservient in importance to the film's sense that nothing in relationships can be perceived very clearly, but that things are in general liable to work out fine. Something in her attitude to life, a kind of residual positive momentum, combined with the simple condition of being young, carries her forward. There is a nice scene (accompanied by a Bowie track) in which she does an extended jazz-run down a New York street, evidently trying to catch a bus. |
| It's a likable movie, with some nice moments of both comedy and pathos, and beautifully shot, but for me the reverence for its heroine was not completely earned, and the arrowhead was missing: the decisive jab of satire, of insight, of love. | It's a likable movie, with some nice moments of both comedy and pathos, and beautifully shot, but for me the reverence for its heroine was not completely earned, and the arrowhead was missing: the decisive jab of satire, of insight, of love. |
| Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning. |