FEATURE:
The Power of Cinema
Greta Gerwig, Frances Ha, and An Eye-Opening Personal Realisation
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AS the film turned ten…
IN THIS PHOTO: Greta Gerwig
in May (May 2013 was the U.S. theatrical release date), I guess this feature is both timely and a little late. I wanted to move slightly away from music and talk about Frances Ha. Actually, it is not entirely true: music is a big part of the film; I will finish by dropping in the amazing soundtrack. There are a few reasons why I want to discuss the film. I will get to that. Co-written by and starring Greta Gerwig as the eponymous character (Frances Halladay), it is a gorgeous black-and-white film director by her partner, Noah Baumbach. The pair recently collaborated on the box office-smashing Barbie – where Gerwig directed but did not act in the film -, and it seems amazing and slightly unreal that the charming and fairly low-budget 2013 film would see its star direct one of the most successful films in recent memory – Gerwig herself was the first solo female director to see a film break $1 bn at the box office. In August 2013, Greta Gerwig was interviewed by Sight & Sound, in the same edition as her future Barbie star, Ryan Gosling. As I have a website and can discuss this thing, rather than just reviewing the film, I wanted to both reveal how cinema can influence and affect people and unlock something deep inside.
Some people new to Greta Gerwig may not even realise that she is an actor. She has been acting for years. Frances Ha is arguably her defining performance. There are some great features written about Frances Ha. In 2013, The New Yorker wrote about Frances Ha and the Pursuit of Happiness; this page gives more details about the film and cast; this feature explores how various films and roles have captured Greta Gerwig’s physicality and mesmerising gift for movement. Also, in 2021, Olivia Rutigliano looked back at Frances Ha nearly a decade later; revising her original thoughts about the film. This feature explores the lessons we can learn from Frances Ha. In In their 2013 review of Frances Ha, The New York Times asked an intriguing question: If twenty-seven is “Old”, then “How Old Is Grown Up?”. There is so much to explore when it comes to Frances Ha. In the same way Barbie has had essays and opinion pieces written about its messages around femininity, the impact of the film, and the brilliance of Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s script, there was similar buzz and intrigue around the lower-budget but no less impactful and wonderful Frances Ha in 2012-to-2013.
Before I come to my thoughts and impressions, The Guardian interviewed Greta Gerwig. At this point an established actor, but someone who was being discussed as a future star and this amazing writer, it is quite humbling looking back a decade at this woman who has gone on change cinema. Oscar-nominated for her director debut, Lady Bird (2017), and its follow-up, Little Women (2019), she set records and created a huge impact with Barbie (2023). On a slight diversion: some of the promotional interviews for Barbie were so deep and engrossing (The New York Times Magazine’s might be among the best). I understand that her next project is Snow White. She has co-written the screenplay (Erin Cressida Wilson) for the film which will star Gal Gadot (who was originally the actress who was going to play Barbie – that role went to Margot Robbie):
“The movie Frances Ha, shot in black and white and on a smaller budget than most film-school productions, is directed by Noah Baumbach and stars Greta Gerwig, his girlfriend and the cause of this season's mass hipster swooning. She is, at 29, more whimsical than her friend Lena Dunham, less self-consciously edgy than her progenitor Chloë Sevigny, and aware of the invidiousness of these kinds of comparisons. The film, meanwhile, is thoroughly excellent.
"I've been having terrible anxiety dreams about it," Gerwig says over pasta on a hot day in Manhattan's West Village. "This must be what it's like to have children." Except no one is going to criticise your children in the newspaper. "Right. Or compare your children to other children, publicly." Gerwig makes a fanciful face. "'He's sort of like this other child, but more hopeless.'"
There are lines from Frances Ha you will want to repeat, their archness just the right side of too cute. "This apartment is very… aware of itself," Mickey Sumner's character Sophie says to Gerwig's Frances, criticising her best friend's new living arrangements, but also the unravelling of their friendship as their 20s draw to a close. The dialogue nails certain states of being: the exact gestation of a private joke; the casual intimacy of friendship at that age ("Stop picking at your face," Sophie says to Frances). There is the sense of bereavement when that friendship wanes, or at the very least changes. As Frances says after Sophie takes up with Patch, a guy in – ugh! – finance, "It's just that if something funny happens on the way to the deli, you'll only tell one person about it and that'll be Patch and I'll never hear about it."
IN THIS PHOTO: Sophie (Mickey Sumner) and Frances (Greta Gerwig) are best friends in Frances Ha/PHOTO CREDIT: IFC Films via The Independent
If you are only dimly aware of Gerwig, who co-wrote Frances Ha with Baumbach, it's probably from her role in Greenberg, the Ben Stiller movie, also directed by Baumbach, that everyone, including him, imagined would do better. It is thought to have underperformed for being too gloomy, and Frances Ha is intentionally lighter. It also has a much bigger role for Gerwig, as a dancer failing to make a living and struggling through the last phase of post-post-adolescence that now extends into a young adult's late 20s. "I'm so embarrassed," she says after doing something particularly gauche. "I'm not a real person, yet."
In different hands, this might have been unbearable, but Gerwig injects Frances with just the right amount of wry detachment, her performance perfectly pitched between shtick and an urgent sincerity. Initially, she hesitated about being in the film, citing reasons of ego. "Noah said, 'That's ridiculous – you're playing Frances.' But it feels kind of disgusting, like baking a cake and eating it yourself. Like, I wrote it, and now I'm doing it! It felt very Orson Welles."
The blessing and curse of my life is that I think I thrive when I have a singular purpose and a calling. But actually I'm happiest when I'm doing lots of things'
So it was a great relief when the film was rapturously received. Gerwig's main concern – that it would be dismissed as frivolous, that "people would think it didn't matter" – didn't come to pass. After the first screening, with great reviews already on Twitter, Baumbach turned to Gerwig and said, "Thanks for giving me a hit."
Not, of course, that it will necessarily make money. The indie film business is too precarious for that. Frances Ha was funded by, as Gerwig puts it, some "lovely Brazilian guys" who wanted minimal interference, even to the extent of forfeiting the indie film's most assured method of recouping investment – selling it to show on TV after the cinema release. (A black-and-white film won't sell in this manner.) But, she says, they understood Baumbach's intention: "Making something as small as he could without sacrificing anything that actually makes a movie worth watching."
Producer Scott Rudin, who works with Baumbach on all his films, was hovering in the background, but "from a distance", Gerwig says. "He looked at casting tapes and read drafts of the script, but it wasn't one of his projects where he was like, 'I'm getting Warner Bros and Sam Mendes and Kate Winslet' or whoever. Then there would be pressure because he's on set every day. But this was much more – he was 'helping'. He showed up once at 3am, on the Lower East Side. Noah looked up and was like, 'Is that Scott Rudin?!' He was on the street corner, opposite us. And we were like, 'How did he even know where we were?'"
IN THIS PHOTO: Greta Gerwig with Noah Baumbach/PHOTO CREDIT: Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Given the modesty of its origins, there are no particular expectations for Frances Ha. In 2011, Baumbach worked on something that looked like such a surefire hit, it was bound to fail: an adaptation of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections for HBO, in which Gerwig was slated to star, along with Ewan McGregor and Chris Cooper. But after a pilot was shot in 2012, HBO failed to commission it and the project was abandoned. "Sometimes," Gerwig says, "the thing that's anticipated more often than not is the thing [that doesn't work]. Things that have been stamped with approval prior to existing have no life. It's so hard to determine what's going to work. You just don't know. David O Russell's last movie before Silver Linings Playbook lost its insurance and was never finished."
Frances Ha has the integrity of a film made precisely the way the film-makers wrote it. The cast were permitted no ad-libbing on set, right down to any extra "like"s and "you know"s. (Gerwig says Sumner, the daughter of Sting and Trudie Styler, had an easier time sticking to the script because she is English and felt less of a gravitational pull towards these idiomatic tics.)
It's the small, quiet moments that make the film: when Frances runs to an ATM and has a moment of hesitation before accepting the $2.50 surcharge; when, while taking a walk in a wood, she remarks with hopeless optimism, "At least you can't spend money in nature." When she says, "I love you, Sophie, even if you do love your phone that has email more than me." At one point, Frances spends money she doesn't have and goes to Paris on a whim. In another film, she would be rewarded for her risky and whimsical flight. Here, she has a rubbish time, wandering around in a state of lonely anticlimax that is both hilarious and true. In desperation, she tries to go to the cinema. "Noah and I always say that the saddest line in the movie is when she's in Paris and she asks the woman in the movie theatre, 'When did Puss In Boots start?' She's not even going to see it from the beginning."
Frances does, ultimately, triumph, and it's a literary script, so the symbolic underpinnings are good. "So much of modern dance is about learning how to fall, and I thought that was kind of a good metaphor for Frances." For Gerwig, too, perhaps; although, in her case, it is less a case of learning to fall than to stop feverishly anticipating all the ways it might happen”.
If you are a fan of Greta Gerwig or new to here work and have not seen Frances Ha, I would highly recommend it. There are some reviews saying it tacks a bit of depth or bite. Maybe it could have fleshed out the characters more. I was enormously impressed and moved by the film. You can rent or buy it on YouTube, or you can stream it through Amazon Video. The reviews for Frances Ha were mostly extremely positive. Most highly praised Greta Gerwig’s lead performance. Wonderfully connecting and pairing with Mickey Sumner, the film is one that left a very big impression on me. Coming back to Sight & Sound, they had their say about one of 2013’s best films:
“Frances Ha, like Frances herself, is genial, charming and only occasionally prone to outbursts that might discomfit the viewer. While its New York locations, hipster milieu and sex comedy suggest vintage Woody Allen-ish ambitions, its lack of grounding in the present moment (aside from ubiquitous iPhones) leaves it feeling inconsequential.
Its lightness – both levity in the writing and a deft performance style – is a virtue given its focus on a dancer and choreographer, but also an irritant as Frances floats through New York. “I’m poor,” Frances notes when she is let go from the company she dances for. “That’s an insult to actual poor people,” her roommate Benji replies; the film then drops the subject of economic precarity. Frances’s search for housing and work is soft-focused by the film’s innate geniality: this is no Wendy and Lucy (2008).
“Lena, I mean Leda,” stutters a character at a dinner party, about an absent acquaintance: Lena Dunham is Banquo’s ghost at this feast. Co-writers Greta Gerwig (who stars as Frances) and Noah Baumbach (who also directs) are as ready with the frank girl talk but less brazen. They are more concerned with the central, and unresolvable, issue of Girls (also crucial to Judd Apatow’s work): the shift from a rich homosocial lifestyle, associated with artistic freedom and hedonism, to unsatisfactory, exclusory heterosexual pair bonding, associated with loss and compromise.Nor does it have to be, but irritation with the film arises from inevitable comparisons, many of which are present as self-aware references. Allen, Whit Stillman, Hal Hartley, Nicole Holofcener: there’s a genealogy of smart-yet-melancholy American indie cinema in which Frances Ha is positioning itself, and whose incisiveness it doesn’t share.
Frances’s relationship with her best friend Sophie, including her return to work at Vassar College where they met, is the heart of the film, narratively taking the place of the expected straight romance/break-up. When Sophie moves out of their shared apartment, Frances enters a nomadic period that evokes another contemporary New York-set work concerned with sex, lies, new technology and uncomfortable roommates: Steve McQueen’s Shame (2011).
Stylistically, the films are worlds apart, not least because Frances Ha is shot in black-and-white. This aesthetic works fitfully: the interiors feel like digital colour images that have been grayscaled, but the exteriors are crisp. In fact it’s an exterior dance sequence that is both evocative of Shame and – perhaps because of the intertext – the most sublime moment in the film. Many reviewers noted the transfixing long take in McQueen’s film of its protagonist Brandon’s night-time jog. Frances, instead, runs, skips, leaps and fouettés irresistibly through Chinatown in daylight as a similar tracking shot keeps pace with her.
She’s running towards her new apartment, rooming with sculptor Lev and wannabe screenwriter Benji (in an in-joke, Benji is writing spec scripts for Saturday Night Live, one of Baumbach’s prior credits), who call the women they sleep with “sluts” – versions of Brandon in a minor key. That Frances is so full of joie de vivre is in pointed contrast to McQueen’s downbeat film. That her run is soundtracked by David Bowie’s Modern Love (which reappears over the end credits) suggests that the film is acknowledging its relation to contemporary statements on modern love such as Shame and Girls, while harking back to a less confrontational era.
Comfortably confident storytelling is a hallmark of Baumbach’s films, and there’s nothing disruptive or inventive here in filmmaking terms, bar the lack of colour – and the incorporation of dance. Frances’s development as a character away from her dyad with Sophie is linked with dance practice, and the film’s light-hearted resolution is an idealised climax where all Frances’s friends attend a dance programme in which she has choreographed a piece about how meetings between paired individuals become an ensemble. Sweetly obvious as it is, the dance is filmed impeccably in wide shot, with a real sense of the movement from rehearsal to realised work.
The serious commitment to filming dance may show the influence of its new popularity in American mainstream culture but could also be linked to another indie darling, Miranda July, whose most recent film The Future similarly focused on an apprentice dancer worrying about commitment. July’s more experimental, innovative and less together film was frustrating in its own ways, but the future that Gerwig and Baumbach propose for Frances seems all too easily achieved and normative, both psychologically and cinematically, compared to the sublime stalemate of July’s characters”.
As I had not watched the film before, when I did sit down to see it last week, I was mesmerised. The black-and-white look gave it this sort of vintage edge. Maybe an Art House feel. It hit me, because I identified with France Ha (Halliday). This person who seemed to have ambitions deep down but, on the surface, was still stuck in childhood. Wanting to live with her best friend, Sophie. Frances is upset when Sophie moves from New York to Tribeca. Even more so when she moved to Tokyo with her boyfriend. It is this feeling that things have to stay the same. Protecting yourself in this childhood bubble. Maybe something familiar and safe. Frances Ha, as a dance instructor and would-be dancer, is struggling to get a foothold. Opportunities seemingly come and go. I think she would be happiest living in New York and having a dance career realised; share an apartment with Sophie and feel safe and warm in the city. Life moves on around her and, by the end, there is a little redemption and hope. At the very end, Frances, upon moving in, writes her name down onto a slip of paper in order to mark her new mailbox. Her full last name does not fit, so she folds the paper to read: ‘Frances Ha’. The filming style and direction uses a lot of quick shots and not a linear structure. It is snapshots into this eventful and never-predictable life. You want to jump into the film and sit alongside the characters – at least I did. At the end, you wonder whether Frances found a dream job and was happy. It did seem to suggest she was falling on her feet. One reason why it struck me, I guess, was a little bit of envy…
New York is a city I have always wanted to live in. I guess it is far-fetched as it would cost a lot - though, seeing these characters exist in a 2012 and 2013 version of the city, it made me miss a place I have never been to. It is a life that I want but fear I will never get. A city I could fit into, I realise that Greta Gerwig would have been in her late-twenties. Frances Ha, although seemingly directionless and lost, had time to figure it out. I am forty and in a similar situation to Frances Ha. Someone who is trying to make something and realise a dream - yet not in such a nice apartment or a city where I want to explore much. I was sad because I wanted to be somewhere that didn’t exist: the New York I saw in 2012. I wanted to be alongside Frances Ha and that world! Snapping out of the filmic mindset, and Frances Ha made me yearn for New York. At forty, can you start again and actually move to a city and achieve your dreams?! Alongside music journalism and doing more with that – a growing list of major stars to profile and interview! -, film has always grabbed me. Not least writing. As a massive Greta Gerwig admirer, actually one of the real dreams is to work for/with her. She might be out of my league and realm when it comes to getting a film made by her production company or working with her. Working with her in some capacity would be a dream – alas, one that thousands of others have and will never realise!
It is strange that a single film can stagger and stun you on several levels. On the one hand, I was completely transfixed by the story and the performance – especially by Greta Gerwig’s incredibly naturalistic and emotional turn. She is funny and child-like, yet there is a vulnerability and depth that means she can go from weird and funny to heartbroken and sombre. A city full of Frances Ha-like people, it made me realise that I am the same. Only living in London. That huge desire to make up for lost time and be in my late-twenties and go to New York was a bombshell. Frances Ha is a magnificent film that actually might be one of my very favourites! It is beautiful and makes me hope that Greta Gerwig returns to Indie films and the like of Frances Ha and Mistress America (2015). You are so convinced by Gerwig’s performance, you sort of hope everything works out. Then you realise that, just over ten years ago, this talented filmmaker was yet to become the idol and record-breaker she is today! Gerwig would go onto direct, and seemingly now is in a position where she can helm huge-budget films. She wouldn’t know it back then. In a way, that made me realise that maybe age shouldn’t be such a big factor.
I am the same age as Greta Gerwig and, although she has undeniably obtained more success, there is time to go. There is time to save and move to New York. You can never say dreams like working with a major director, finding a community in a big city and comfort there is beyond comprehension – even in a very strange and slightly bleak world today. I have to concede that I am not in my twenties, so there will be certain accommodations. Like a friend group that is closer to my age; not enjoying the sort of career trajectory Greta Gerwig has enjoyed. If Frances Ha was sobering in some ways, it was also eye-opening! Seeing its star go on to big things. Awakening me to the fact that maybe staying in a comfort zone is not the best thing. Frances Ha was happy in the end, but she had to deal with change and life moving on. I wanted to speak about the film, just over ten years since it was released in the U.S. More than that, it shows that a film – whether a blockbuster or a smaller Indie flick – can have a profound and meaningful effect on anyone. I was not expecting to be so moved and affected by Frances Ha. It has made me determined to plan ahead and keep going. Maybe accept that some things are out of my reach. Though you can never rule things out. Frances Ha provoked a lot of thought and life decisions. Various scenes and snaps of dialogue run through my mind. Expression and shots that will stay with me. Perhaps the most memorable sequence in Frances Ha is where the eponymous character is running through the streets of New York. The camera almost has to find her running. It searches and catches up with her! A dizzying and exhausting experience (as you can hear at the end of this Greta Gerwig interview on The Adam Buxton Podcast in 2018 (when she was promoting Lady Bird; skip to 54:12). The song she was dancing to is David Bowie’s Modern Love. Intoxicating and delightful, that scene of France Ha running provoked so many reactions and thoughts. I have written about Greta Gerwig quite a bit lately – what with Barbie’s success and importance -, so I probably won’t until her next film/directorial effort. Given the force with which the decade-old Frances Ha had on me – and how film can change your life and have that power -, I felt compelled to return to her feet…
ONE more time.