Effortless and effervescent, "Frances Ha" is a small miracle of a movie, honest and funny with an aim that's true. It's both a timeless story of the joys and sorrows of youth and a dead-on portrait of how things are right now for one particular New York woman who, try as she might, can't quite get her life together.

That would be the Frances of the title (the Ha isn't explained until the film's charming final frame), a joint creation of and career high point for both star Greta Gerwig and director Noah Baumbach, who met on the director's "Greenberg" and co-wrote the script.

Together they have created an American independent film (shot in luminous black and white by Sam Levy) that feels off the cuff but is in fact exactly made by a filmmaker in total control of his resources. With a soundtrack that makes liberal use of music from Georges Delerue, a frequent Francois Truffaut collaborator, it's got the energy and verve of the French New Wave but remains unmistakably itself.

Credit here belongs in large part to Gerwig, who proved the leavening touch in Baumbach's last film, the largely unbearable Ben Stiller brood vehicle Greenberg. There, Gerwig's dressed-down frumpiness and tongue-tied, aw-shucks humility served to cut Stiller's hard-faced astringency. Here, Gerwig and Baumbach configure those same self-consciously "quirky," half-manic qualities negatively. Frances is fun (as when she pees off a subway tunnel after a night of drinking) and funny (as when she honks off the advances of a would-be suitor), yet she's also capricious, stubborn, and self-interested, traits that at once endear her to a NYC subclass of parentally subsidized fuck-abouts (Adam Driver, Michael Zegen) and alienate her from her more careerist, self-serious longtime BFF (Mickey Sumner).

As with Girls, something about Frances's identificatory push-pull nags. In places, like a dinner scene that rivals The Texas Chainsaw Massacre's horrific bread-breaking, Frances Ha is too confident and truly terrifying to scan as cute. In pithier passages, like Frances's detour to her upstate alma mater to teach dance, slum around a dorm, and half-heartedly soul search, or precious snatches of dialogue ("I'm not even a real person," Frances beams at one point, in what might as well be a popular t-shirt slogan encapsulating twentysomething malaise), the film flattens abjection into a kind of condescending, wounded-bird pitying. We feel for her because we—or at least the film's presumed viewer—are her. Baumbach and Gerwig are too rosy in their recuperation of Frances, especially as she hunkers down, takes a desk job, mounts her own dance routine, finds an apartment, and generally springs through a too-quick last act that feels like a strained, half-deserved "get your shit together" montage.

Gary Tooze

November 5th, 2012