Coping with Plan B

It is fun to see a movie that is enjoyably simple and quite straightforward in its narrative, yet holds enough layers in story and characters that there are many ways to read it. Frances Ha, directed by Noah Baumbach with a screenplay by Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, the movie’s main star, is one of those movies. It is a pleasure to watch and even more fun to write about.

The basic story is as simple and as old as the dream-catcher city in which it develops: a young woman follows her dreams of becoming an artist to New York, establishes relationships with other young dreamers, but is surely enough confronted with the reality of life... or its statistics, like how few of the millions who aspire to be artists actually make it.

Lucky for us, both Baumbach and Gerwig are among those few.

The layers are there from the start. To begin with this is a comedy, not a drama, though it plays as both throughout the film. Frances Halliday, the character played by Gerwig, comes from what seems to be a secure and happy enough rambler-house middle class back in California. She’s gone to college in the east and there has met the person with whom she develops the strongest relationship of the film, her friend Sophie, a writer aspiring to become an editor, and someone from a higher income class than Frances. We catch them in New York at the beginning of the film, both in their late twenties, slowly coming off their college high, paving the way to their brilliant futures, or so they hope.  Frances apprentices for a dance company but doesn’t really have the talent to be a great dancer, but she’s happy because she and Sophie “are the same person”.  We, the spectators, know right from the beginning that they are not, thanks to the great and very subtle acting by Gerwig and Mickey Sumner, who plays Sophie.

Mickey Sumner and Greta Gerwig in Frances Ha

Theirs is no ordinary friendship, or at least this is what Frances thinks. And Frances is no ordinary person, or rather, she is ordinary in the sense that she is like all of us, all who are not part of an elite in the world. She’s like us in our youth, people with bigger dreams than possibilities; people who believe that relationships can be that self-less, strong and wonderful; that everyone is (or should be) the same in terms of opportunities to succeed.

We are taken through the diminishing of Frances’s and Sophie’s dreams, each for very different reasons.  But the freshness in this story, besides the comedic perspective and Gerwig’s acting, is how Frances copes with the changes in her circumstances (and addresses).  There is a scene in the film where Frances does this rather slap-stick fall while running to get cash from an ATM; she picks herself up and keeps running. It's without a doubt a metaphor. Curiously enough, it seems that Frances, the one who isn’t from the elite, is the one who is able to keep 'running', and this makes everything fit. I won’t go much further into the story, not because it would give anything away but because there really isn’t anything extraordinary about what happens; so like life.

 Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg) has not really directed an original with Frances Ha since he does quite some borrowing. The film is in black and white and of course Woody Allen’s Manhattan comes to mind, because this is New York and many of Frances’s friends are elitist hipsters with apartments in Tribeca, Paris or cute $4,000 “holes” in Manhattan itself, living a sort of existential or quarter-life crisis.The coloring works because it focuses on the people (Frances) more than the city, through Sam Levy’s good camera work. The score borrows from Georges Delerue’s King of Hearts, and so on. Yet, again, Gerwig’s roller coaster acting through almost every emotion possible makes it its own movie, as does the more up to date dialogue.

I believe there probably are different interpretations to Frances and her hipster friends. Some might find her annoying and extremely naïve; others fresh and sweet; some even truly “undateable”; which only proves, in any case,  that the movie has layers. In my read of the movie, the underdog (all of us) finds a way to cope with plan B and, in the end, has the last laugh.