Frances Ha is kind of a prequel to Sex and the City. The movie follows a twenty-seven year old dancer in New York City as she tries to straighten our her personal and professional lives. It was instant nostalgia for me, conjuring a time when my friends and I lived in apartments with stacks of ratty paperbacks, postcards taped to the walls, and furniture rescued from the sidewalk. We heated water for tea in sauce pots, tossed our clothes on the floor, and smoked inside. In his review critic Armond White pointed out that the movie’s demographic of young urban creatives is a highly privileged one. But the movie’s details are so exquisitely and honestly rendered that they’re touching. Frances arrives late at a loft party and searches fearfully in the dark for her friends, Frances throws herself enthusiastically and awkwardly into a dinner party conversation, and Frances suffers gamely through a date knowing all the while that the handsome young man isn’t attracted to her. The only false note is a bright, abrupt Hollywood ending that leaves her with a promising career, a beautiful apartment, and a supportive partner. While I want her to have all these things I know they won’t fall into place so easily, or all at once.
The most satisfying element of the movie is the rich, unfussy black and white photography by Sam Levy. The feeling is looser than that of Manhattan, which unfolds like a series of still photographs, and closer to the eccentric storytelling in Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise. Frances Ha, like that movie, is set in a cloistered hipster underworld (unnamed bars, walk-up apartments, black box theaters) where characters communicate in an argot of slow spare sentences. The most expressive scenes in the movie are the ones that show us Frances running through the streets from one place to the next, which are used as transitions. The frame is fixed tightly on her figure and the streetscape, barely legible, streams behind her. There’s nothing pretty about the views; they’re raw and energetic. Yet they get perfectly at what it felt like living in New York City when I was young, rushing around passionately and myopically, unaware of the worlds outside my own. Life felt like an endless string of epiphanies, and it passed in a dazzling, exhilerating blur.
Photograph courtesy of IFC Films.