Frances Ha

In the middle of Noah Baumbach's "Frances Ha," the title character, a 27-year old mostly unemployed dancer, is down on her luck. It's not that things are going badly for her -- the film is far too even-tempered and mild for anything approaching hardship or tragedy or, even, conflict; she's just at loose ends and doesn't know what to do with herself. At a dinner party, a man boasts about having an apartment in Paris and, on a whim, Frances flies there for the weekend, staying alone in his house. She also goes to Sacramento, her home-town, and we see her walking the family dog, a small white ball of fur, a generic suburban pet: you've seen a thousand dogs like this and really never noticed them. The film is presented in black and white and the little dog is rim-lit like Jean Harlow or Veronica Lake -- the light behind the small pooch outlines the dog with a luminous halo. This is a point of interest, a "punctum" and the dog features in the next several scenes, held against someone's chest at center frame or occupying a corner of the picture, a graceful editing effect that ties the sequence together. The image of the radiant dog epitomizes the film: Baumbach's movie is fantastically realistic and precise -- I didn't detect anything approaching a false note at any point in the picture. "Frances Ha" concerns mundane events in a young woman's life -- meetings with friends, minor disappointments, dance rehearsels, difficulty paying the rent and problems with roommates. These things are shown with complete fidelity. Everything seems magically true and believable. But Baumbach films this quotidian subject matter in luminous, high contrast black and white, the metier of film noir and Hollywood glamor and the contrast between the velvety beauty of the movie's imagery and the common place events depicted accounts for much of the film's charm. (The film is already on a Criterion disk and, from some supplemental material, I understand that the picture was shot with digital camcorder that recorded everything in color and, then, printed in black and white.) The things that we see are not dramatic -- there's no sex, no drug use or bad behavior although in once scene a girl gets sick from drinking, people act in a decent way and don't abuse one another, conflict is muted, no one is angry at anyone: scometimes,people are just mildly disappointed with each other, travels don't result in any sort of epiphany and there are no grand emotions and no operatic love affairs. It's just every day life -- but isn't every day life worthy of being shown as beautiful, edited with precision and care, back-lit so that a woman's hair (or a dog's fur) gleams with supernatural radiance? Greta Gerwig, who plays Frances, gives one of the greatest performances that I have ever seen -- she has a fantastically expressive face, although Frances also is like the little dog: she seems completely average, the girl next door, someone you might not even notice on a busy street. But we can see her think. This is very rare in films -- sometimes in Ozu, you glimpse people thinking, deliberating on something, making a decision before they act. Greta Gerwig has the placid serenity of an Ozu heroine even when she is a little bit sad or agitated and we can see the way her mind works -- she is an open book to us and, as is the case in great acting, seems more real and present than some people that we have known all of our lives. Baumbach's trust in the truth, his uncompromising realism, is evident in the sequence in which Frances goes to Paris. We see her uncomfortable ride on the airplane to the City of Light. We see her on the bus departing the airport. In the man's apartment, we are shown a montage of Frances sleeping or not sleeping -- she is jet-lagged and the digital clock seems to be persecuting her: first she can't sleep and, then, she can do nothing but sleep, and since we know she can only stay in Paris for the weekend, we fear that she will spend the whole time in bed. But she does go out and wanders around aimlessly and we see the Eifel Tower, of course, with its rotating beam of light in the background: she sits alone in a cafe and, then, we see her at the airport in New York again. Nothing has happened. She hasn't met anyone new. There is no love affair with a romantic stranger and the trip to Paris hasn't changed her in the slightest. Isn't this a model for real life, the way that life happens to us unawares, the way that something happens without really making an point on us although in retrospect, we might regard the event as decisive. Frances has to return to Vassar where she went to college and works as a Resident Assistant. She comes in one night and finds a disconsolate girl sitting on the floor next to the door to her bedroom. Frances looks tired, but she knows her duty so she sits down on the floor across from the girl. At that point, Baumbach cuts away from the scene -- presumably, the girl has suffered something that she thinks is tragic and, probably, is about to shed tears and bemoan her plight. But this would be too dramatic for the film and it would be a tactless invasion of this minor character's privacy to show the conversatin so Baumbach doesn't depict any more of the encounter. "Frances Ha" sometimes invokes Woody Allen's great "Manhattan", also a film shot in lustrous black and white -- but "Manhattan" was about love and the fear of death, about the middle-aged hero's anxieties and about the beautiful, mask-like face of Mariel Hemingway, the hero's great love. The film was resplendent with the music of Gershwin and melodramatic. "Francis Ha," also a great film but of a different sort, doesn't have these qualities -- it's about a young woman's day-to-day life and dares you to find her mild adventures inconsequential. The art work that it most reminds me of is Flaubert's "A Sentimental Education" in which we are shown the exact texture of an every day life in which nothing much seems to be happening -- but, of course, everything is happening and a whole world is presented to us for our analysis and contemplation.