Frances Ha (2012) review
Greta Gerwig testing the viewer’s patience in Frances Ha (2012)
An infantile and pitiful piece. Perhaps that was the goal: to annoy viewers. The homonymous character is played by Great Gerwig, a lady with the special talent of seeming talented. Frances Ha is insufferably childish, emotionally and intellectually undeveloped, silly, and irresponsible. But she’s also good and inoffensive –– and that’s truly intolerable. In films we can stand almost anything in a character, if it's one of the bad guys. An immature young-adult who can’t actually harm anyone should be killed off by the director – on screen and some 30 minutes into the film, tops – as Hitchcock taught us in Psycho.
The script is not inspired when it comes to conversation. The dialogues are usually dull and uninteresting, like most American teenagers. These people don’t even say hello like adults. And they’re not fifteen-year olds. These are types in their mid to late twenties, even early thirties. There’s a certain glorification of prolonged and pitiable middle-class infantilization. It’s not sweet: it’s pathetic. One feels the need to be cured after watching this film. (And the cure might be something like, say, GoodFellas.)
We feel sorry for most characters who are sick with stupidity, can’t grow up adequately, and merely indulge themselves in whiny, adolescent behavior. These are, ultimately, sad little brats. Perhaps, again, that was precisely the idea of director Noah Baumbach. It hit the chord in that case, though a bad one. All characters are unbearably spoiled and shallow. Not in a funny way, but in a deplorable one. We lust for their behavior to find its way, somehow, to the penal code. This can’t go unpunished.
But it goes. Where are the mean types about whom we can say, “if they’re not criminals, they could be”? ––– No where to be found. There is nothing serious about this film, except, maybe, its pretension. It attempts a European flavor, a Nouvelle Vague-ish style of filmmaking, but fails (oh how it fails!) again, pitifully, for it lacks wit and class. It misses entirely the morbid undertones of the Nouvelle Vague, which, whatever one thinks about it, had flair. The love of violence, the fetishistic portrayal of guns and cars, the sardonic and sexual innuendos, the playfulness with cinema, the social aspect of mass culture and economic ascendancy. Only a prude would take Frances Ha as an R-rated movie. It’s a PG-13: a naïve high schooler’s version of the Nouvelle Vague, one who thinks saying ‘fuck’ freely means anything but charmlessness. “Wash your mouth” is a thought that constantly springs to mind when watching this film.
Yes, the film has some merits. For starters, it is finite. Also, the now famous scene where David Bowie’s “Modern Love” plays while Gerwig dance-crosses avenues in New York strikes some good taste, at least a slim possibility of it. That is refreshing, for at this point into the film we already feel like good taste might not even be a thing, but just a legend. Something about that scene, then, brings some hope, awakening us from lethargic lament. But... It is, of course, mere pastiche, a mixed homage to Leo Carax’s Mauvais Sang (1986) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE_hYojg90o), that a truly great film, and Woody Allen running down the streets of Manhattan in Manhattan (1979) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4mgqt7uhlo). So not even that.
In the end, this is not a world we are curious about, nor one we care much for. It’s not fun and it’s not dangerous. Those kids ought to be sent to jail; then we’d have a movie…
