I’m late to discussion of this movie, which is currently streaming on Netflix. I highly recommend it– and it’s sweet! And I just saw so many connections in it, which I loved, that I had to do a little blog review.
We watched it last night with Steve’s daughter M., who is 24 and living in Brooklyn. The subject matter: a young woman finding her way in New York as an optimistic but not very talented dancer, must have struck close to home for M. And since the director was Noah Baumbach (Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg) and things often get uncomfortable and don’t go well at all for the characters, she had reason to worry. It can be tough in New York for people who might be slightly delusional about their talent or ability. Then again, they might get lucky.
I was busy at the beginning of the film trying to figure out why it was in black and white. I mean, you can’t just do that, shoot an ordinary film like this about hipsters in New York in black and white. There seemed no real reason for it. It did make the actress, Greta Gerwig, look fabulous. But it seemed to be more, somehow, about New York.
Adam Driver in Frances Ha
As soon as I saw Adam Driver as the roommate Lev Shapiro, sporting a porkpie hat, I thought, “Oh, of course. Stranger than Paradise.” That movie was one of the original indie films back in the 1980s, along with Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, both of which were in black and white. Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise is about a man, Willie, played by John Lurie (looking very much like Adam Driver), a tall,
Stranger than Paradise
dark-haired hipster in a porkpie hat. When his cousin Eva from Budapest comes to visit him, he ignores her. They don’t do anything but hang around in the apartment with Willie’s friend Eddie. Eventually, they go to Cleveland, and then to Florida.
What immediately impresses me every time about Jarmusch’s films is how dang long they seem. It’s not just that they’re slow. It’s that they’re often made up of incredibly short shots. Stranger than Paradise fades to black about 100 times. It drags the pacing down. Frances Ha sort of has the same thing going on. Trying to give us little bits and pieces, very ordinary ones, that actually propel us into the characters but don’t take us far in the plot, can also make the viewing experience uncomfortable. “What’s going to happen??”
Frances doesn’t go to Cleveland. She does go to Sacramento. We think maybe she’s giving up and moving home — she’s just lost her winter gig and her apartment– but no, it’s just Christmas. She goes to the Unitarian church and other family gatherings. She gets her tank of optimism soundly refilled, then she flies back to New York.
And then, I thought, “Oh, this is more like Annie Hall.” But that wasn’t in black and white. Manhattan, then. But actually Annie Hall. Or both, a love affair between the director and New York and the director and the actress. Plus, I see from a quick IMDB check that the average length of a shot in Annie Hall was 14.2 seconds. Not the average length of a scene, but that is still a lot of cuts.
There is no big onscreen romantic relationship in Frances Ha, but there is a very sweet flirtation between her and a young Jewish man (the third roommate with Lev), Benji (played by Michael Zegen), who is writing Saturday Night Live skits and sitcoms and screenplays. And yes, could easily be Noah Baumbach. Or Alvy Singer.
So I was not surprised to see that Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig are a couple. The camera loves her– and her personality and that of the fictional Frances seem as close as Diane Keaton and Annie Hall.
But there’s more. Greta is from Sacramento (those are her real parents) and was raised a Unitarian, just like in the movie. It is her Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. She went to Barnard, a close cousin to Vassar, where some scenes are set. And although her chosen field wasn’t dancing, she does seem to have flailed around, both lucky and charmed and also not feeling like things were working out, for her first few years in New York. Kind of like Annie Hall singing.
According to New Republic critic David Thompson, the black and white, all of it, is not about either of these (well, Woody Allen a little) but a tribute to French New Wave film. Not just in the black and white, but in its– a girl in Paris/New York behaving randomly in ways that stall the progression of a plot. That makes sense. Jean Paul-Balmondo had that great hat in Breathless.
This movie is, of course, no Annie Hall. It is no Breathless. It is, however, much more fun and watchable than Stranger than Paradise. And you don’t have to worry. She is lucky. She is charmed. Unlike Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character in Margot at the Wedding (or any movie JJ-L is in– JJ-L who is Baumbach’s ex-wife), the world of this film is happy in love. It looks out for her.