frances ha

It’s appropriate, then, that two of my favorite, and in my opinion, the liveliest, movies of the year featured incorrigible, unmannered talking; Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) of Before Midnight, and Frances of Frances Ha, all of whom are gifted jabbers in movies meant to feel casual and loosely improvisational, although Frances, with a recognizable penchant for self-irony that fails to compensate for a lack of awareness of either herself or the ones around her, probably enjoys imagining that she is a rougher outline of the shinier and self-possessed urbanites Jesse and Celine are. Frances, you sense, is confident enough in her own wit to believe that everything she says will offer value or entertainment to the listener without a filter necessary, and some of this assuredness is undoubtedly drawn from her blissfully close relationship with her best friend, Sophie, to whom she can read aloud to, imagine stories, and laughingly pantomime meathead boys. Watching Frances banter—or rather, attempts to—with other people, then, is like watching the dawning realization of a child who realizes that through interactions with strangers, acquaintances, and even good friends that even loved ones are occasionally lying or pretending when they treat everything they do with what they believe is sincere fascination. In an excellent brief shot, Frances patters on about a quirk of hers at a party to another guest, Lev (Adam Driver) who leans in flirtatiously while clearly paying little attention to what she is saying. Frances is oblivious. Later, as she goes through a revolving door of apartments, roommates, and gigs, Frances' patter gets more halting and unsure as connections prove to be more volatile than the last; more silence fills the air after she finishes each time, even when what she is saying is truly inspired at times. During the movie's most comically cruel sequence, set at a dinner party filled with mostly married professionals, Frances blurts out a moving but weirdly intimate monologue about what love means to her before standing up in horror: "I'm not stoned," she clarifies with dawning self-consciousness, before scurrying off. Almost immediately afterwards, she bumps into an old friend and begins rambling to his girlfriend. "I don't know you," responds the girlfriend, wide-eyed. So Frances beats on, boat against the current. 

Verbal creatures in movies still often find their revelatory moments in still moments; maybe we as people still intuit that even the most eloquent of words can't express what silence can, or maybe silence in cinema connotes introspection. And so it is that the some of the high points of Frances Ha come when Frances is wordless; dancing or choreographing with contagious exhilaration. And the emotional ones end up being barely more articulate: In a scene of unusual primal urgency, Frances runs after Sophie's car, inexplicably howling the latter's name as if her life depended on it. And you feel Frances' child/adolescent self die a little in that wail as Sophie disappears down the road; walls are drawn up in that moment as some invisible thread between Frances and her best friend breaks permanently.

Things are fine in the end. Frances even gets to have a moment where she exchanges glances with Sophie in a way that sweetly ties back to her earlier monologue. But her last exchange in the movie reveals herself to be a bit more reserved than before, and we guess that the wail and the glance bookend the place where Frances began to grow up and get her shit together, carrying herself with someone who has learned to do more and talk less. That in itself is a little heartbreaking for its lost innocence. But Frances smiles knowingly. Her free-spiritedness has been truncated a little, as suggested by a winking visual pun at the end. But not entirely lost. 


 It harkens back to one of Celine's confessions in Before Sunset: "I guess when you're young, you just believe there'll be many people with whom you'll connect with. Later in life, you realize it only happens a few times." (I may have seen this scened gif'd on my Tumblr dashboard a few times too many.)