Ah, "Frances Ha"

Director Noah Baumbach's films tend to be hit or miss for me, and it's often the same with the films Greta Gerwig appears in or contributes to. When I heard that they were collaborating on a new project about the travails of a twenty-something New Yorker in post-grad hell, I was a little skeptical. Their last film together, "Greenberg," was a difficult one to sit through, though I enjoyed Gerwig's performance in it. And between Lena Dunham's "Girls" and Gerwig's previous features like "Lola Versus," wasn't this already pretty well-tread ground? Well, I'm happy to report that "Frances Ha" is one of the hits for both Baumbach and Gerwig, and one of the best films I've seen all year.

Gerwig plays the titular Frances, an optimistic, but naive young woman who is barely getting by. At the age of twenty-seven, five years after graduating from Vassar, she is an apprentice at a dance company that only offers sporadic work. She's a little socially obtuse, with a tendency to overshare and ramble on at length about her personal failings. Her biggest piece of stability is sharing a Brooklyn apartment with her close friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner), so when Sophie moves out unexpectedly to live with her boyfriend, Frances is left adrift, forced to figure out how to navigate life on her own. The rest of the film sees her go from one unstable living situation to another, her financial situation always getting more dire, her identity in flux, and her estrangement from Sophie more and more pronounced.

There's something very appealing about Frances, despite the fact that she's immature, self-obsessed, exasperating, and at times shows an alarming lack of self-awareness. Even though she's not getting the financial support that some of her peers are, Frances is an unmistakable child of privilege, chasing fantasies of being an artist that grow more unrealistic by the day. At one point, during a disastrous date, she blurts out "I'm not a real person yet" along with her apology. I like that she's smart enough to know she has a lot of growing up to do, and the fact she's clearly trying very, very hard to make something of herself. She literally fall flat on her face, but gets up and keeps on going. Greta Gerwig's performance is refreshingly sincere and funny, where in other hands Frances might be too aggravating to take.

Aside from some of the cringeworthy situations that Frances gets herself into, this doesn't feel much like any of Noah Baumbach's recent work. There are clear similarities to his 1995 debut, "Kicking and Screaming," but from a very different perspective. And "Frances Ha" certainly doesn't look like one of his films, shot in crisp black and white on digital film, conjuring memories of Woody Allen romancing New York. I think the biggest difference is that the central relationship is neither a romantic or a familial one, but really the friendship between Frances and Sophie. It operates a little like a broken romance one, with Frances in the role of the dumped ex, who hasn't gotten over the split, but this is clearly a platonic female friendship. And those are still rare enough in film that such a candid portrayal of one is a treat.

The film is a series of loosely structured vignettes, following Frances on her often aimless wanderings through various parts of New York, punctuated by trips to see her family and impulse visits to out of state friends. It can be meandering as a result, but the writing is so keenly observed and Gerwig's performance is so good, I never lost interest. There are many other characters in the film, mostly other young adults like Frances, mostly casual acquaintances that drift in and out of her life without really connecting in any meaningful way. From Frances's point of view they all seem to be in far better circumstances, their lives more ordered and meaningful, but we get just enough of her interactions with minor characters like Lev (Adam Driver) and Benji (Michael Zegen) to understand that they're not much more mature than she is.

I also appreciate that unlike "Girls" or much of the other media about twenty-something existential malaise, Frances's limbo is finite. Oh, she's not out of the woods at the end of the movie and there's the all too real possibility that she's get her feet knocked out from under her again soon enough, but there's the sense that she does change and she does grow up a little bit. It makes her adventures far more satisfying to watch. There's hope for her, so there's surely hope for Hannah Horvath and all the others still stuck between jobs or between apartments, waiting to become real people too. I hope Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig will collaborate again soon.

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