Frances Ha & the Aimless Representations of Urban Life
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Justine Lee ACE-UE 110-022 Professor Stein March 29, 2017 Frances Ha & the Aimless Representations of Urban Life The New Yorkers portrayed in the films of Woody Allen and Nora Ephron, such as Manhattan (1979) and When Harry Met Sally (1989), are very outdated. They are so often white middle-aged men and women residing in posh brownstones in Upper Manhattan. With great college-educated backgrounds and secure professional careers, their journeys revolve solely around finding the perfect romantic partner. These films move towards a satisfying, happy ending that comforts any viewer. To those viewers, I dare you to consider the complete opposite of this charming New York lifestyle. If you’re struggling, director Noah Baumbach and screenwriter/actress Greta Gerwig have no trouble depicting these imperfect humans on your behalf. Baumbach and Gerwig’s 2013 film, Frances Ha illustrates the story of the titular Frances, a twenty-seven year old dance apprentice, as she floats through life in New York City. She begins the film in an incandescently happy state: living in Brooklyn with Sophie, her best friend from college. They spend waking moments play fighting, running around, and cracking jokes together. Even at night, they fall asleep in the same bed discussing their plans to take over the world: Sophie will be a successful publishing mogul while Frances will become a famous modern dancer and together, they’ll speak at college graduations and garner “so many honorary degrees” (9:57). For the time being, they’re both struggling to rise up within their respective careers and romantic relationships. That is until Sophie’s life advances and she decides to move out. Concurrently, Frances is temporarily dropped from her dance company’s roster. The sudden shakeup causes her to spiral into a crisis of being friendless, jobless, and even at times homeless, which is what the majority of the film seeks to explore. Without her best friend and dancing gig, Frances is forced to evaluate every aspect of her life only to discover she’s an incomplete human being. That is why throughout the film, she repeatedly says, “I’m so embarrassed, I’m not a real person yet” (17:29). But Frances couldn’t truly be accepted in the adult community even with these spiritual values because they aren’t economically feasible in the real world. Frances Ha makes one wonder if the post-collegiate individual can come of age if they’re uncertain about growing up. What does the film reveal to us about the necessity of compromising personal values during the process of entering contemporary culture? The strains of this friendship are painfully evident when Sophie visits Frances in the apartment she shares with two rich boys, Benji and Lev, for the first time. Sophie moves in slow, soft steps as she meticulously examines every inch of the living room. In just a few seconds, she’s analyzed the space so profoundly that she’s able to declare that the “apartment is very….aware of itself” (28:47). Because of her rhythm, Sophie stays in the frame for the entire scene but Frances bursts in and out of the shot as she stirs around frantically in a childlike disposition, making huge noises. Nonetheless, this is one of few scenes since the beginning where the audience sees the two characters in one shot . We hope they could continue coexisting in singularity but they must go onto their separate lives. The obvious fact presented in the scene is that these two friends aren’t really the same person anymore. They were once in sync because they shared the same whimsical spirit about the future, that distant period of time when all sorts of success and happiness would be achieved. As Sophie moved to Tribeca and got closer to the person she intended on becoming, her childlike energy had to be compromised. This transition shakes the very existence of Frances who “while hardly stupid, has a huge capacity for denial” and tries anything to maintain the duo’s magic (Taubin). In the most contentious scene of the film, we see the two friends together in conversation in a public restroom. Sophie, having been dragged to the room by her friend, leans on the walls with her arms crossed as she waits for Frances. As Sophie admits her growing love for her boyfriend, Patch, Frances calls “bullshit” because she thinks she knows her friend so well. After Frances angrily screams, “I want to love him if you love him but you don’t love him” and “Don’t treat me like three-hour-brunch friend!”, Sophie says, “All right, I’m not talking to you while you’re like this” and prepares to leave (35:24). Suddenly, Frances hurls her body around Sophie to stop her from leaving the frame and walking away from Frances’s life. Still, she’s unsuccessful. Therefore, the titular protagonist loses the one person, whom she considers to be the love of her life, to the changes essential to growing up and ageing in a culture that demands the rejection of two women’s intimate and everlasting friendship. Losing Sophie also entailed losing her apartment as Frances was unable to afford living alone in such an expensive city. What results is a period of drifting, both mentally and physically, that is best seen through her changing addresses in the form of title cards. Each place she crashes at is like an anthropological study on the “tastes, behavior, lifestyles, and interior decoration” of the various people who live in New York City (French). At first, Frances rooms with Benji and Lev in their spacious flat in Chinatown. Bouncing from here and there, she even returns to her alma mater to work as a RA in the dormitories for the free housing in what may be the film’s most cringeworthy progression of scenes . Frances settles in and briefly loses herself within whatever lifestyle she’s housed in; however before she can fully go native, she finds a way to destabilize the situation and moves onto whatever shelter she can seek next. This depiction of living situations highlights the reality of how New York has always been unsympathetic to young adults just beginning. It also hints at how the modern audience now expects a more realistic portrayal of city life. A generation ago, our version of the typical NYC apartment was Carrie Bradshaw’s rent- controlled Upper East Side brownstone on Sex and the City. We somehow normalized the idea that a freelance writer could afford such luxuries as having a walk-in closet. As the housing costs rose and the economic landscape shattered, Ronda Kaysen of The New York Times argues that the apartments on screen became “grittier, dirtier, and even more cramped. You could almost say it is angry.” But “the grime and the lack of space” and temporary living situations were intentional because “people can watch and be like, ‘Oh yeah, I had an apartment like that.’’ (Kaysen). TV and film have traded fantasy for reality to capture the brutal process of self- actualization in the city. The characters of contemporary media (such as Frances Ha, Broad City, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt) exist in unique types of struggles where their economic burdens are ever so present. By watching these stories, the audience is able to comprehend that a stable life in New York, while possible to attain, is created through hard work and a plethora of struggle preceding it. Along with platonic love, the art of dance is not only a significant part of Frances’s identity that becomes trampled but also an evolving theme within the film itself. In an interview with Sight and Sound magazine, Noah Baumbach gave his explanation regarding the importance of dance as a key element. It helped him and Gerwig convey so much as it is “romantic” and “very visual, it’s a great metaphor for Frances’s struggles and that time in your life -- because it’s an occupation with an expiry date for everyone who commits to it.” As an apprentice and understudy in a modern dance troupe, Frances frequently made unforeseen body movements to express her idiosyncrasy. The dance company, parallel to what society was trying to do to her values, trapped Frances in predetermined boundaries in which she couldn’t practice art the way she wanted to. In a way, being let go was the best thing for Frances because it freed her and ultimately led to her to choreograph an original piece that looked like a bundle of mistakes, just how she admits she likes things to look (1:20:08). There is a correlation between her role in a given dance and the dance itself that demonstrates how Frances evolves from living in a state of constant denial to actually getting a firmer grip on life and the reality of her imperfections. The most we see Frances physically free is when she sprints, jumps, and pirouettes across the streets of Lower Manhattan to David Bowie’s “Modern Love” in an enchanting homage to Denis Lavant’s dance in Leo Carax’s 1986 French film Mauvais Sang. While the replication is noticeable, the way Frances Ha goes about moving across the street is different in that her movements are imperfect, improvised, and are “utterly detached from romance” (Brody). Frances Ha pulls much more French New Wave inspiration on top of this scene reproduction. Baumbach uses the same Georges Delerue music from Francois Truffaut’s Such a Gorgeous Kid like Me to capture a similar aesthetic and mood. In addition, Baumbach’s use of “editing is almost pure [Francois] Truffaut in its myriad soft shades of gray, recalls the early black-and- white films of both Truffaut and Godard, albeit the digital lensing is flatter and more sketchy, i.e., contemporary” (Thomson).