What If "Frances Ha" Ruled the World...

I'm rather smitten with Frances Ha as I've previously mentioned.  What's engaging and almost revelatory about Noah Baumbach's new irony-soaked misfit comedy is that it's undeniably a very hopeful film.  Despite the fact that the leading character, named Frances, wonderfully played by Greta Gerwig in her finest hour (to date, for sure-- she's still quite young, but this will be a hard act to follow) is a fairly feckless woman going through a 21st century quarter century malaise.  She's an aspiring dancer at the age of twenty-seven, but really she's just an apprentice without much means for economic stability, she's romantically unattached (even rendered "undateable" by close friends) and doesn't even have a home of her own.  In fact, the entire conceit of Frances Ha is hinged on her mooching of friends and acquaintances as she hops around New York City with little else than the semi-false conviction she tells herself (and others) that it's all going to work out in the end.  And yet, the film is wistful and charming and utterly believable in spite of its post-modern, black and white filmed, Woody Allen-esque romanticism.  The film is certainly one of the few genuine highlights of the years so far, and will likely remain so by year's end.

I suppose one of the reason that I'm so taken with Frances Ha and its main character is because I instantly felt a sort of kinship to her in a way I haven't felt at the movies in quite a while.  This being the start of the summer movie season, that's rather miraculous in itself-- not that it's impossible to feel that way about grown men in tights, per se.  Both Frances and myself (in my distorted sense of reality, we're close friends) came of age in the same slice of time, and both of us yearn for a life filled with creativity, even with the nagging sense of perhaps not having the slightest clue on how to go about doing so, and the even more nagging sense that the tide of time is starting to mark the term "aspiring" as something rather pathetic.  For 27 (in full disclosure, I'm turned 28 last fall, but that matters not) is, of course, not old...not now at least, and not here.  For coming of age now feels likes a series of blunders and missteps and false starts more so than perhaps ever before, and that's not even accounting for the fact that, as a society, we've grown ever more complacent and feel some sense of accomplishment in the sense of discovering some new toy in our iGadget world.  The feelings of entitlement over such devices is a topic for another day.

Deeper than that, the quarter century crisis of 2013 in unlike those of before because it's informed by the last two decades of economic recessions, wars on terror, the FOX News Network, eight years of George W. Bush, and six so far of President Obama.  There's been enough of an outcry to arms and confusion and anger that has beset this generation, but unlike the baby boomers distraught and outraged by the corruption of the Nixon administration and the spurring of the counterculture, us spawns of the Reagan era have lied mostly dormant-- the most radical thing we may do is change our Facebook avatars to voice our support for same-sex marriage.  Surely, that's not completely true, but that safety net and security of living through digital currency has changed the way we attack when disturbing by things-- now it most commonly comes in the form of "like" buttons.  Is this out of depression, a feeling of hopelessness or just plain right laziness?  

Frances has moments throughout the film where she says outwardly that she should be doing something, but finds herself instead with drinking with her pals and in a genuine assessment of 21st quarter century ennui-- merely hanging out.  That's our bid for doing something.  Frances Ha digs beautifully and artfully into this generation, and it's sort of post-growing pains growing pains.  It's startling to realize that Mr. Baumbach himself is 43-years-old, and yet how acutely and accurately dissects the quirks of the iGeneration and even more startling that the film is such a deft and affectionate one that.  Frances is perhaps a totem for now.

She's certainly intelligent and assured, but consumed by that certain pull of frustration and constant negativity that plagues the very now of society.  It's certainly strange, and not exactly new at all, but more persistent now in its extremity that even in languid tranquility, there's a certain doom that seems to have won the war long ago.  For instance, anyone who has watched television in the past few weeks has been beholden to the natural terrors of Oklahoma and very man-made ones in Boston.  Multiply this anguish by years of coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan and Iran, northeastern storms dubbed "Frankenstorm" and Hurricane Katrina.  This past television year, many watched show Smash out of contempt...it was dubbed "hatewatching," but in a way, aren't we all just hatewatching the world these days?  It's a hard world outside and rationalizing the harshness of the scary events of the world can feel slightly suffocating if your private world is quite going the way you think it should.  Being that the cinema has long been my comfort, it's even harder to reconcile very real world terror depicted on the big screen for big popcorn thrill rides (see recent examples Iron Man 3 and Star Trek Into Darkness), but there's a respite in Frances Ha's wistful hopefulness in the land that suckiness built.

Frances Ha is far removed from politics, but Gerwig's characterization is filled with the very tics I see in myself and many I'm closest too.  It's a charming and disarming movie, charmingly staged and spliced with an off-the-cuff realness that the scenes all feel lived-in, not staged at all, but any twentysomething whose ever felt a sense of struggle can relate to it, I feel.  One day, people like myself and the other Frances' of the world will rule it.  Frances copes by going on with a soundtrack in her head and hope in her heart.  The most joyous scene of the film shows her flinging and flailing the streets of New York while Bowie's "Modern Love" soothes the background.  It's a tenderly transcendent moment, even whilst being a strictly only-the-movies thing.  All the frustrations and grief and ennui and anger is seemingly pushed aside by a wave of optimism and hope and regeneration that even when all is it at its worst, you can create and imagine a more perfect destiny.  I'd love to do that too.  Unfortunately, there are certain things that can only be deemed socially acceptable in quirky independent comedies; in the streets I would be deemed a lunatic dancing to imaginary tunes.

I'm not really sure where I'm going here.  I fear this might read like a hopeless foam at the mouth exercise without order or direction, which is actually in keeping with Frances' train of thought whether she's running and falling about in the streets or desperately trying to act like a sophisticate at grown up dinner parties.  The expression of a cinematic character speaking for a generation, even if in a especially specific way, or a personal attachment of a piece of art speaking to someone at just the right moment in life.  There's a moment in the film where Frances in near-apparent sincerity says, "sometimes it's good to do what you're supposed when you're supposed to do it." For the social misfit, that's pretty much as to the point as her character gets, but more importantly, something a film character comes along at the right moment in the passage of time for it become truly meaningful.  If I were 40-years-old or 17-years-old, Frances and her vaguely misguided plights and adventures likely would not have crossed my mind as something other than an on-the-surface diversion.  Now, and at this stage, she and film come across as nearly rebellious in so that in that you trudge the shit around and within and continue because someone's art is important, even if it's silly and has an audience restricted to but one, and of absolute value even if you're penniless.