Frances Ha will make many spit ‘Frances…Bah!’ but I won’t be among them. Yes, it is rather kooky, and highly self-conscious, with its New Wave references and its Woody Allen influences (it’s a serious, black-and-white, Manhattan comedy), but it’s also sweet, endearing, touching, and features proper women you can actually believe in, and who aren’t just drippily searching for love, which is something of a novelty. Plus, it comes in at under 90 minutes, which is totally great. I was over the moon about that.
You know, when I am appointed Professor of Film Studies somewhere, as is still only a matter of time, the first thing I will tell my students, once we’ve dealt with the New Waveyness of the New Wave — Goddard: he was a one! — is not to go on and on and on. ‘Say what you have to say then get the hell out,’ I will tell them. Then I may well add: ‘What, you think we don’t have homes to go to?’ Sometimes, I don’t even think it crosses their minds!
This is a film by Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale, Greenberg, among others), who wrote it, concisely, along with his girlfriend, the actress Greta Gerwig, who stars, and is a lovely actress; gorgeous, but also fresh and real and generous, somehow. Hollywood actresses, as a rule, look as if they’ll snap and shatter into tiny sharp shards should they fall over, say, but Ms Gerwig looks as if she’d bounce right back up. Anyway, she is Frances, a 27-year-old who has been happily floating through life but has reached that point where she senses she needs to get her act together; needs something solid to hang on to: a job, her own apartment, but not a boyfriend, particularly, thank God.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in