It has been years since I've seen a film by a young (relatively) director like Noah Baumbach that didn't smack of self centeredness or severe plagiarism (though it must be noted that the score was pleasantly guilty of plagiarizing French New Wave soundtracks, most likely ones by Georges Delerue). Frances Ha is in unpretentious black and white - in other words, Baumbach uses the style as God meant it to be used and that is to get intimate with a character in a way that is more innocent than you find in most colored films.
At first, I was slow to warm up to the film but the lead performance and the dialog throughout the film is so strikingly fresh that it made me feel (at my advanced age of 60) that young people still do have brains. I particularly enjoyed the observation made by Frances, at a dinner party, that when someone has a kid and believes they are less egocentric, the belief is a fraud because their fawning, though not directly over themselves, is still clearly self directed since they made the children. This one observation by the character is enough to make her transcend the stigma of being generational. Frances is just as fresh and likable a character if she was created in France in the sixties or Germany in the 1920'a. The character is genuine, no small feat to accomplish at any period in film history. And while there is a sense of longed for nostalgia (the writers seem to wish that they had been born in the fifties), there are few films that are more immediate and genuine in conveying that horrifying period which is your twenties.
At first, I was slow to warm up to the film but the lead performance and the dialog throughout the film is so strikingly fresh that it made me feel (at my advanced age of 60) that young people still do have brains. I particularly enjoyed the observation made by Frances, at a dinner party, that when someone has a kid and believes they are less egocentric, the belief is a fraud because their fawning, though not directly over themselves, is still clearly self directed since they made the children. This one observation by the character is enough to make her transcend the stigma of being generational. Frances is just as fresh and likable a character if she was created in France in the sixties or Germany in the 1920'a. The character is genuine, no small feat to accomplish at any period in film history. And while there is a sense of longed for nostalgia (the writers seem to wish that they had been born in the fifties), there are few films that are more immediate and genuine in conveying that horrifying period which is your twenties.