Frances Ha (2012) ***
Dir. Noah Baumbach
Starring: Greta Gerwig, Mickey Sumner, Grace Gummer, Adam Driver, Michael Zegen, Michael Esper, Patrick Hausinger
Review By Greg Klymkiw
Does anybody really like whimsy? Sadly, too many. Especially those who pretend they love art films, but would NEVER be caught dead in the real thing. Instead, this particularly loathsome brand of poseurs will flock to French films that overflow with whimsical properties like rivers of snot spewing from a crack whore's nostrils.
The French, of course, are masters of this sickening element of cinema that one might as well call it a genre. Amélie is the ultimate nadir of whimsical cinema - so revoltingly twee all I wanted to do was cold-cock Audrey Tatou with a roundhouse to her stupidly winsome face and just keep smashing it repeatedly with my fists (or, for extra flavour, a healthy series of pistol whips across the bridge of her nose).
Though the first few minutes of Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha was charming me, I was also getting a few warning tingles not unlike those that rise, almost like bile, whenever whimsical French movies unspool before me. Luckily, a couple of factors allowed me to suppress the need to cold-cock someone.
First of all, Audrey Tatou was nowhere in sight and I was instead blessed with the galumphing beauty of Greta (Damsels in Distress) Gerwig. Secondly, the movie is not French. It's American, thank Christ. Even though Baumbach layers his soundtrack with endless movie music by Georges Delerue (notably, some themes from one of the most offensive French turd droppings of whimsy, King of Hearts), it's all used in the service of evoking an exotic sense of romance to the Manhattan locations which, serve as a backdrop to this tale of friendship and self-discovery
On the surface, Frances Ha could well be subtitled: Greta Gerwig Gets Her Own Apartment. The title character she plays surfs from one couch to another after Sophie (Mickey Sumner), her best friend and roommate, decides to move into a desirable and tony Tribeca flat Frances can't possibly afford.
Everyone our heroine knows either has a job or is a rich kid. Frances comes from modest middle class stock, works as an apprentice dancer and sometime ballet teacher and does so in New York - surely one of the most expensive cities to live in the world.
She's 27, can't really dance well at all and her dreams of the future are far too unrealistic - especially considering that her mentor/boss at the dance company can see where Frances's real talent lies - a talent Frances can't imagine she has.
The film is endowed with a simple, vignette-heavy plot, but these set pieces of parties, clubs, dinners, slacking and just plain having fun are always funny, joyous and genuinely moving because it becomes plainly obvious that Frances needs more than her own apartment and a job that fulfills her - she needs to grow-up but also maintain her deep love and friendship with Sophie.
Baumbach wisely chose to shoot his film in black and white which goes a long way to allowing us to accept this fairy tale of a young woman steadfastly holding onto a storybook existence of perpetual childhood. Cinematographer Same Levy manages to paint some gorgeous images without shooting on traditional film stock.
Using a Canon EOS 5D, Levy manages to replicate the sort of lovely fine grain so prevalent in well shot 16-to-35 blow-ups in days of yore. More importantly, the film seems to be timed perfectly to capture the gorgeous old silver nitrate look from the 30s. That said, my limited screenings of the film suggest that auditorium size, throw and projector calibration go a long way to achieve the best possible look for the picture. One screening I experienced, the picture seemed murky and with little detail, while yet another was a night and day situation where in the picture had both detail and lustre.
All in all, Frances Ha is a sweet, funny and meandering little movie - chockfull of lovely performances, some deft writing from star Gerwig in collaboration with Baumbach and several sequences infused with pure, unadulterated joy. Most of all, it's so refreshing to see a movie about young, vibrant, smart women where they're not relegated to being mere appendages to the male characters or worse, shoehorned into traditional contemporary chick-flick trappings.
The picture delivers real flesh and blood and though it does border precariously upon the precipice of whimsy, it never flings itself with the sort of offensive abandon the French are so obsessed with into the maw of rancid whimsy that inspires a good upchuck rather than a genuine good time.
"Frances Ha" from Mongrel Media premieres at TIFF 2012."