Frances Ha (***)

“Meandering” was the word I wrote down while watching this. It refers both to the plot and to Frances (Greta Gerwig), whose last name is not Ha. As it begins, she is an apprentice dancer living with her Sophie, a best friend with whom she is so close they are “like a lesbian couple who don’t have sex anymore.” Asked to move in by her boyfriend, she breaks up with him instead. But then Sophie, having found a nicer place, moves out. In New York City, good apartments are more coveted than best friends. And so Frances, who cannot afford her own place, becomes figuratively, and then literally, unmoored, finding new friends and new places to sleep.

Frances is the creation of writer-director Noah Baumbach and Gerwig, who gets a co-writing credit. Most of Baumbach’s films feature more combative main characters; that was so in The Squid and the Whale, probably his best film, and in Greenberg, his last one, in which Gerwig played the love interest of the title character. In Damsels in Distress, she proved capable of playing a very different type of character, but her affect here seems a lot like in Greenberg, a bit awkward, gangly even. Her voice has a buttery quality, almost a mumbly undercurrent. She is not combative, but falls between sweet and offbeat. (In a running private joke, a male friend calls her “undateable” when she is at her oddest.) Sometimes, mostly toward the beginning of the movie, she is funny.

And she is in every scene, so your response to her and Frances will be your response to the movie, which is about her attempts to find her way into adulthood — or about losing a best friend. Baumbach’s movies are very talky, and that combined with the New York setting (and white, educated characters), will remind you of Woody Allen movies, but unlike Allen’s movies, the characters are almost all in their 20s and living with roommates. That the film is in black and white may be a tribute to Allen’s Manhattan, but where in that case it gave the city an air of glamour, here it seems to render the city a little drab, perhaps symbolic of a woman whose life has lost a little color.

On the whole, I favor Baumbach’s last few films, with their sharper edges. But, as always, the dialogue here sounds natural, and I liked that Frances was a mixed bag of a character, not always acting wisely or with forethought, but finding ways to get by.

IMDb link

viewed 6/10/13 7:45 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 6/10/13