FRANCES HA

Noah Bambach is one of the great masters of emotional rawness. Over the years he's developed a great gift for taking the most extreme misanthropes and cutting them down until we can connect with them. His new comedy, Frances Ha, doesn't feature anyone as difficult to like as the family in The Squid and the Whale but while that might make this new film seem almost slight in comparison, it still emerges as a complex, richly observed portrait of a friendship in the midst of transformation.

As the film starts Frances and Sophie (Gretta Gerwig and Mickey Summer, respectively) are inseparable. They met in collage and became roommates afterwards. They do everything together: eat, smoke, play-fight, even fall asleep on the couch next to each other watching YouTube. Their friends describe them alternatively as "the same person but with different hair" and "like one of those lesbian couples who never have sex." Such connectivity isn't necessarily unhealthy, but it is unsustainable. A fact Frances learns when Sophie moves out of the apartment to be with her boyfriend.

Sophie promises that they'll still hang out, but they both know that it won't be the same. Their special, almost psychic connection is now diluted and devalued. Frances tires to cope, but the dates she goes on just seem to fizzle and the surrogate friends/roommates she tries out can't keep up with her endless, restless, self destructive energy. Mostly she tries her best to pay her rent with a flagging dancing carrier, couch surfing her way around Brooklyn on a course she hopes will reunite her with Sophie.

How much you like Frances Ha will really come down to how much you like Frances herself, or at least how much you identify with her problems. The film is so much an extension of her. Gerwig (who also co-wrote the screenplay) pulls off some great acting gymnastics, transitioning quickly from childlike glee to forlorn without ever putting it too thick. We perhaps get a few too many scenes of Frances running around the city being silly (the best being a left field homage to Leoes Carax's Bad Blood), but it seems right for a film about a girl with such a shaky personal identity to have a looser, sometimes meandering structure. Does it make any logical, Earth-bound sense to have Frances jet off to Paris for a short leg of the film? No, but it does make sense for her character's emotional journey. She's been alienated in every other way, being alienated by language and location isn't a bad way to externalize her internal troubles.

Frances is a rare kind of film that attempts to map out the life of a friendship in realistic terms. However self-conscious it occasionally feels when things don't work is somewhat irrelevant in the face of what does. There are other films in recent memory that do some of the same stuff well. Many of the films produced by the Mumblecore movement have much of the same emotional rawness within their own profoundly small scopes and many of them also star Greta Gerwig. But few of them demonstrate this much craft. Bombach and Gerwig aren't just doing an expensive Mumblecore movie, they're contextualizing within film history, in addition to that Leoes Carax homage, we have references to the French New wave and Black & White photography that explicitly recalls Woody Allen's Manhattan. What does that mean to the main story? Probably very little except to suggest that as current and zeitgeisty as Frances and co seem, their problems are ones shared by people of every generation.

Grade: B+