Frances Ha

Noah Baumbach is a good and interesting film maker, Frances Ha being his sixth feature, and I have seen the last four, including this film. His third film, Margot at the Wedding, used Jennifer Jason Leigh, with whom Baumbach has a child. His forth film, Greenberg, used Greta Gerwig in a good part, and she is now Baumbach's partner. This film, Frances Ha, has Gerwig on screen in pretty well every scene playing an unfocused person whose life is drifting.

At the beginning of the film she separates from her boyfriend and for the rest of the film she is moving from friend to friend changing address often and the film follows her, with intertitles between the sections of the film showing their different addresses.

We follow Frances as she engages with her small and not particularly appealing circle of friends, always chattering, often inconsequentially, and even contradicting herself in adjacent sentences. I became tired of listening to and watching her. I came simply to find her irritating. The film reminded me of Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, which also followed a person who's life was empty and who did not have anything interesting to say. Also, in less extreme form, it made me think of Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky, another very irritating film. I am sure the filmmaker and his crew enjoyed it when Frances went to Paris for a weekend and they could film her sitting disconsolately on public benches, bored, or lying in bed staring at the ceiling, and we could several times admire the Eiffel Tower in the background.

If the film has any dramatic arc it is that 27-year-old Frances is letting a satisfactory future slip away as she dithers and drifts. This is brought into focus in her work as a dancer when, instead of being promoted to the main company, she is offered an administrative job in the office.

Greta Gerwig plays the part of Frances well, and it is not her fault that Frances is so wearing.

The film is shot in a slightly strange monochrome - black and white with a slight hint of sepia, I think - in which the blacks are saturated and lacking detail, making the image seem slightly muddy. I also found the image quality of Margot at the Wedding to be strange - very subdued and low-contrast colour which had me wondering whether to adjust the colour controls of my TV.

I hope Frances Ha is an indulgence to celebrate the new relationship between Baumbach and Gerwig, and that his next film with be a return to form.