“I Make Love”: A Film Review of Frances Ha
by Meg Carroll
Shot in dimensional black and white, Frances Ha is the portrait of a jilted young woman, Frances (Greta Gerwig), and her precarious adventures in New York City after her best friend and roommate, Sophie (Mickey Sumner), breaks their lease and emotionally fractures their relationship. Left to find housing in the ever-tumultuous New York housing landscape alone, Frances reveals herself as a woman who is gently brash, undyingly witty, slightly codependent, and yet, ardently loving.
Frances is 27 and is coming to terms with her age — “You look older [than Sophie]… like, a lot older” — and the fact that life seems to have left her behind — “… but less grown up.” Her new roommate Benji (Michael Zegen), who frequently quips that Frances is “undateable” because of her penchant for quoting literature and her man walk, tells her in a casually transparent moment, “You don’t have your shit together.” Frances’ character speaks to the parts of ourselves, in us young women particularly, that feel lost, undecided, and prone to imposter syndrome:
“What do you do?”
“Well, it’s kind of hard to explain.”
“Because what you do is complicated?”
“Uh, because I don’t really do it.”
But in witnessing Frances’ many career pitfalls and social blunders — “Should I text him back, ‘Starboard anal sex?’” — the compassion for her character mounts, and we discover in her messy persona an enviable expressiveness. Her awkward and sometimes childish behaviors are juxtaposed with moments of mature references that even escape those around her: “You know what Virginia Woolf book this reminds me of?” But the most alluring aspect of Frances’ character is that she is unashamed of who she is, and she continues to be herself amidst all of the funny looks. Her confidence is often unfounded, but Frances always seems to find a way to live comfortably in chaos, and in her perpetually messy apartment: “I’m not messy, I’m busy!”
While Frances Ha is a coming-of-age story about a woman getting her life together, it is most centrally a story about a woman vying for authentic love. Frances looks for love in many places after Sophie “breaks up” with her: “I kind of have a crush on this boy, but his name is Georgie… so I don’t really know how far its gonna go.” She seems to find new platonic love, however comparatively fleeting it is, with her new roommates Benji and Lev (Adam Driver), two men who embody the stereotype of edgy New York City artist languishing on family money. But if there is anything that Frances Ha is not, it is a movie about men. The men in the movie float around the periphery as Frances grapples with her career and tries to find a place to live.
Greta Gerwig in Frances Ha
She’s also busy trying to make new friends. At a dinner party with people her same age, yet who seem far more mature than she, Frances unabashedly — or maybe drunkenly — launches into the monologue that is the climax of the film. She proclaims truly what she wants “out of a relationship… out of life really, love.” However, the emotional fulfillment of the movie doesn’t come until the very end, when we discover who Frances is meant to love all along. It’s likely that the epiphany at the end of this film will leave you questioning your own relationships and the places you look for the most genuine love.
If you don’t stay for the millennial humor, or the witty dialogue between Sophie and Frances, or the aesthetic scenes of New York City corner stores in black and white, or even the soundtrack — queue “Every1’s a Winner” by Hot Chocolate — stay for Frances herself. She would want you to. Her character reaches down into the throat of every young woman who has ever felt side swept by life and starts her heart beating again. Frances has flaws, yes, but they are overshadowed by the understanding that all Frances really wants is the same thing we all do: true love. And a steady job, too.
Whether you see the movie or not, perhaps we should all strive to be more like Frances. We should run through the streets to Bowie’s “Modern Love,” we should read Proust in Paris because it’s nice “to do the things that we’re supposed to do when we’re supposed to do them.” We should tell our friends we love them and not expect to hear it back, and we should comfort random people we find crying in hallways. We should watch documentaries and live our lives in contradiction to them anyway, if only because it makes us happy, and we should make love, not fuck. Perhaps if we live in this way — openly and honestly and lovingly — everything will turn out all right, just as it does in the delightful and charming Frances Ha.
Quotes taken from Frances Ha (2012) directed by Noah Baumbach and written by Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig.