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USA 2013
Directed by
Noah Baumbach
86 minutes
Rated M

Reviewed by
Andrew Lee
3 stars

Frances Ha

Synopsis: Frances (Greta Gerwig) lives with her best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner). At least until Sophie decides to move in with her boyfriend, leaving Frances with an apartment she can’t afford. So she bounces around trying to find a place to live, struggling to cope with the sense that she’s been dumped by her best friend.

Do you like Greta Gerwig? Great, you’ll love this film. No? Well, you’ll hate this film. If you're asking "who is Greta Gerwig?", I’m not sure how you’ll react. Here, playing Frances, she’s a well-intentioned but self-obsessed New Yorker trying to pursue an artistic career as a dancer but not doing very well. She’s also prone to awkward social gaffes due to her aforementioned self-obsession. In reality, Frances is the kind of person you stop inviting to parties or ask around for dinner out of pity because of their failure to move on with their life. In Noah Baumbach’s almost parodic emulation of 1990’s New York independent cinema, she’s a character you kind of love but more tend to cringe from. And that’s funny, if that’s your kind of funny. It’s my kind of funny, at least in this case, so I enjoyed it. You may not, and I say that because this sort of film is definitely an acquired taste.

Baumbach’s  greatest success to date has been the 2005's offbeat The Squid and The Whale. It was a critical and commercial highwater mark to which his subsequent efforts in the same terrain, Margot At The Wedding and Greenberg have not returned. He is also a long-time collaborator of indie film wizard Wes Anderson, with whom he co-wrote The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Fantastic Mr Fox. Hence it's no surprise that Frances Ha is well into the whole indie film schtick. It’s filmed in black and white, à la French New Wave, has lots of scenes of people sitting in apartments talking at length about their day-to-day issues and, well, yeah…

So this is a strange one. It’s a reminder of the sort of American Independent cinema that rapidly became a cliché back in the nineties, but it’s also a lot of fun. A lot of that has to go to the fact that it does have something to the core of it which is the complicated relationship of two friends who are deeply entwined in each others lives, only to have that broken up by a third-wheel/boyfriend. It’s a familiar story and well explored. But in the end, your enjoyment of this film will depend on your tolerance for an over-indulgence of quirk and cringe.…

 

 

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