Much of the buzz on Noah Baumbach’s new Frances Ha is that it’s his most “humane” and “sincere” film, which
may be true, but it actually has more in common with his first film, 1995’s Kicking and Screaming, than one might think, as Kicking also has a very caring core beneath its hyper-verbal, ironic dialogue.
Both films deal with transitional moments in young lives. In Kicking,
it’s the first post-college year. The film’s
characters, ill-prepared for the “real life” of work and adulthood, exist in a
kind of limbo, lingering on or near campus, spouting off about philosophy and
pop-culture. Time is still marked by
semesters, indicated by title cards.
Frances turns its attention to characters in their late 20’s, still floundering
in terms of careers, living an almost nomadic existence of constantly switching
apartments and crashing on couches. Here
time is marked by the various addresses of Greta Gerwig's Frances, which flash occasionally on screen. Stylistically, the films are quite
different, but the evolution seems organic:
Kicking’s characters cannot
stop talking, while the characters of Frances
are either silently absorbed in cellphone screens or speaking a kind of insider’s
language, old jokes and references that are deeply engrained and which may not
necessarily be clear to us as viewers.
Frances’ evocative black-and-white photography destabilizes the high-tech
trappings of its characters, creating a strange, timeless feel: if they weren’t curled up in bed with their
laptops this could be almost any era. It's worth noting that Kicking also utilizes a bit of
black-and-white: the heartfelt center of
the film is a dissolving relationship story told through flashbacks that begin
with black-and-white freeze frames.
This is sometimes read as “paralysis,” preserving the idealized past,
but it’s probably not that simple. Broken-hearted
Grover seems ultimately to scour these memories looking for a way forward, even if the very moving final scene leaves us poised in
the past, at a moment of hope that we, but not the characters, realize is
ill-fated.
While one certainly could
see the films as critiques of characters who are stunted, unable to grow up (“I’m
not a grown-up,” Frances explains to a friend when her credit card is rejected in a restaurant), there’s ultimately more fondness than satire in
both of them (whereas Baumbach’s Squid
and the Whale is a more blistering, corrosive look at academia). In Kicking,
Eric Stoltz’s Chet, the perpetual student, speaks of his eventual epiphany,, the moment
where he quits trying to fight his immersion in college town culture and
recognizes “This IS my life.” Frances’
titular character also moves toward embracing her often frustrating existence, and we see halting progress at the end as she accepts her failed dreams
of being a dancer and settles into a role as a choreographer. “I like things
that look like mistakes,” she says of her young charges' performance near the
end, which might be read as a commentary on her own life. The film’s last-second explanation of its
title, a beautifully wordless moment, also echoes Frances’ statement, which
resonates thematically in interesting ways the more you think about it.
Frances and Sophie (Greta Gerwig and Mickey Sumner):
Kicking's Grover and Jane (Josh Hamilton and Olivia d'Abo).
