Frances Ha (2013). Courtesy IFC Films / IFC Center.
Frances and Sophie have the easy intimacy of people who expect to keep sharing a life. They know each other's routines and can turn an ordinary evening into something worth remembering. In Frances Ha, the trouble begins when Sophie starts making plans that Frances cannot assume will include her.
Greta Gerwig plays a 27-year-old apprentice with a New York dance company. Sophie, played by Mickey Sumner, is her best friend and roommate. As Sophie's life changes, Frances moves between apartments, friends and jobs. Noah Baumbach and Gerwig, who wrote the film together, give those practical changes an emotional charge: losing an address can also mean losing the person with whom you imagined living there.
At the 2012 New York Film Festival press conference, the filmmakers described developing the screenplay by passing scenes, characters and ideas back and forth. Sumner recalled receiving only the scenes involving Sophie, which kept her focused on what her character was doing in each moment. Sophie has her own version of events. She does not have to experience a decision as abandonment for Frances to feel abandoned by it.
Frances keeps trying to explain herself while other people appear to be getting on with things. Gerwig makes the attempts funny, then lets the embarrassment linger a little longer than is comfortable. Frances can be impulsive or exhausting company without becoming someone the film wants us to dismiss. The same eagerness that gets her into trouble makes an invitation or a small sign of affection matter enormously.
Baumbach told the festival audience that he wanted an intimate, homemade feeling and a return to lightness. Shooting digitally in black and white helped shape the choices of music and location. The result gives Frances's unsettled life room for pleasure. New York can still look inviting even when she cannot figure out how to afford her place in it.
The friendship gives all that movement a reference point. Frances can try another room or another idea of herself, but what she wants from Sophie is harder to replace. Their conversations contain the awkward business of finding out how close they can remain without living as they did before. Gerwig lets us see how much Frances invests in a look, a shared joke or the possibility of being understood.
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