Film review: Frances Ha

You will love it unless you're evil and hate everything

Thu, 25/07/2013 - 14:19 by Tim Chipping

This will be an uncharacteristically short film review from us because there's so little to say about Frances Ha. It's a tiny, low budget bundle of black & white, subtly comic, loveliness. Written by the film's star Greta Gerwig and the director Noah Baumbach it's a tale of friendship, romance, apartment sharing, unemployment, thwarted ambition and aimlessness, in which nothing much happens. And you will love it unless you're evil and hate everything.

If you fell in love with Greta Gerwig after Damsels In Distress (as we did) but were disappointed by last year's Lola Versus (and who wasn't?) this is everything that film tried to be and failed. Frances Ha also begins with a breakup, and a central character similarly self-obsessed and charmingly clueless (Greta's forte it seems). But God is in the details and Baumbach and Gerwig have delighted in filling the script so it overflows with believable personality quirks, glorious babbling dialogue and joyous social awkwardness.

The film's drawn comparisons with Lena Dunham's Girls. It's an easy shelf to put it on, since Frances Ha also deals with a woman in her rapidly increasing 20s who has yet to figure out who she is and what she's supposed to be doing. But where Girls delights in the worst aspects of a solipsistic generation, Frances is all heart and silliness. But it does have Adam Driver in it. So it is a bit like Girls.

There's no romance, no action, peril or suspense. Nothing really happens at all. It's mostly just an hour and a half of Greta Gerwig saying stuff.

And we never wanted it to end.

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