New York. Black & White. Greta Gerwig runs through the streets of the big city to the sounds of David Bowie’s Modern Love. Welcome to the world of Frances Ha, Noah Baumbach’s love letter to cinematic slackers and grown up life shirkers. Gerwig plays the eponymous Frances, a 27 year old apprentice dancer, who we are first introduced to, in a habitual state of marital role-play with her best Sophie (Mickey Sumner, hugely bespectacled with sardonic wit, like a hipster Deirdre Barlow). They live together, eat together, play fight together and even sometimes share a bed together, acting like a comfortable couple , even saying themselves it’s like they are married, in the fact that they do everything together except having sex. It almost seems in the beginning of the film that life would be easier if the girls were romantically involved as the men in their life seem almost superfluous.
However this buddy bunk up comes to a sudden halt when Sophie announces she is leaving their apartment to move into the district she has longed to live in, somewhere Frances cannot afford and cannot follow. This sends Frances on a sporadic journey to try to organise her life-traversing apartment switching, career dead ends and ill advised trips, whilst continually subverting the conventions of growing up. She is a woman at a crossroads of life, not willing to give up the frivolity of youth but unable to sustain the carefree existence that is attainable to the wealthy trust fund kids. She, quite literally ambles from scene to scene with no clear direction, echoing the unstable mood of a restless generation. 
Greta Gerwig has her fair share of admirers and detractors and Frances Ha will no doubt strengthen both camps arguments. The admirers will revel in her breezy infectious tone, her uninhibited and unglamorous portrayal of a skittish daydreamer. The non converted will find her character self absorbed, immature and twee and to some extent she is these things, at times you want to shake her by the shoulders and try to pull her misdirection together. It’s safe to say that I fall in the former category and find Gerwig’s performance refreshingly real but also wistfully romantic, to revel in the possibilities of life, while mundane realities seep into the consciousness. What is also refreshing about Frances Ha is the film does not make it its mission to find our heroine a man. She is often referred to as ‘un-dateable’, which would hint that this theory would be proved wrong later in the film. Frances does not end up with a boyfriend and the film tackles the often more problematic relationship- the best friend and how this bond copes when one is ready to move on before the other does.
Being shot in black and white not only makes Frances Ha look gorgeous but lends itself to the minimalistic sensibilities of the film and adds emphasis to the thread of malaise that runs through the narrative. The scene where Frances wanders the streets of Paris to Hot Chocolate’s Everyone’s a Winner becomes more significant than a scene with a Hot Chocolate song has any cause to be, the elegant cinematography highlighting the loneliness of Frances irrational choices. Baumbach gets the best from his Miss Mumblecore and directs her and the supporting players with a zesty realism, they may not be the people you want them to be, and perhaps we as an audience do not like to see our characters like real humans, selfish and childlike as many of us can be. But Baumbach presents them as they are, their setting may be unlike ours, yet the feelings will be familiar. This makes Frances Ha a melancholy gem, one for the dreamers and the jaded. And one especially for the Gerwig lovers.
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