Frances Ha & the Difficulty of Liking Things in 2020
By Maria Staack
Artwork by Alex Ramos
When I first started getting into film a few years ago, I accepted that Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s beloved indie classic, Frances Ha (2012), was amazing with no questions asked. Before even watching it, I would often come across the movie in online listicles with titles like “Top 10 Indie Movies of This Decade” or “Best Hidden Gems on Netflix.” None of my friends at the time liked movies in the same way I was starting to, so I regrettably took internet opinions about movies as the word of God.
The first time I watched Frances Ha, I was not disappointed. The film captured similar feelings to the other indie coming of age movies I liked at the time, but offered a different, more artistic and mature framework. The stiff and awkward dialogue, while strange at first, captured a realism I had not seen on screen before and I was impressed that a movie could be still in black and white today. At the last scene, when Frances sticks the paper with her name on it into the slot on her new mailbox and it reads “Frances Ha” instead of “Frances Haliday” because her full name wouldn’t fit, everything on screen fell into place just as I hoped my own life would. I still feel this way when I watch that very scene.
Frances Ha to this day remains one of my favorite movies. I watch it when I need Frances to reassure me that everything will be okay. When she blows her entire savings on a weekend away to Paris, only to spend most of her time recovering from jet lag, it reminds me that I must face my problems head on rather than try to escape them. I can’t help but see myself in Frances when she dances down a busy street, or shares a secret glance with her best friend from across the room, or keeps talking even though nobody else cares what she’s saying. All 85 minutes of the film vibrate with an energetic life force that suggest the struggles of adulthood come with happy moments and good people. About ten minutes in, I fall into a hypnotic trance which leads me to sheepishly fall in love with Frances every single time. Those first ten minutes, though, are filled with hesitance and frustration.
Before falling into my trance, I know exactly what is to come. A white woman and all of her white friends will traipse around New York City, acting entitled whilst complaining of shallow problems, such as having to ask their parents for a loan or not fitting in at a dinner party. Don’t get me wrong, their problems are real to them, which is part of what makes the story so appealing, but I resent every character as they are all complicit in the gentrification of the city. Perhaps the worst part about gentrification is that the people taking part in it are totally oblivious, as shown in Frances Ha.
At one point, Frances moves into an apartment in Chinatown with her friends Benji and Lev. Chinatown has historically housed a large population of working class Chinese people, but in recent years, middle class white people fitting the description of Benji, Lev, and Frances have contributed to a forced migration of the Chinese population out of Chinatown. Frances cannot afford to live in the Chinatown apartment for long, which some might see as an exemption from her participation in gentrification. However, she eventually moves into an apartment in Washington Heights, where the same type of gentrification occurs towards Black and Latinx populations.
Frances Ha has firm ties to reality. Frances goes home to Sacramento, where the actress, Gerwig, is from. In Sacramento, Frances stays with her parents, played by Gerwig’s own parents. More examples of connections to reality line the entirety of the film. By embodying reality in this way, the film forces us to take its content very seriously, even while it appears light hearted. Though it makes no attempt to acknowledge such themes, the act of gentrification embeds itself into the fabric of the film. As viewers we must take it upon ourselves to acknowledge Frances and her friends’ complacency in gentrification so as to recognize its impacts in the world beyond the film.
Unfortunately, I cannot offer a solution to gentrification, but I can I offer this critique of one of my favorite movies to encourage others not to fall into the trappings of perceiving media as either good or bad. I relate to Frances in many ways, but I also understand that she and people like her challenge my reality as a black woman. Having to contemplate culture all the time is hard, I admit, but people of color have to do it on a daily basis because of how pop culture treats our stories. If you haven’t seen it, I hope you’ll add Frances Ha to your watchlist, but bear in mind there’s a world outside of Frances’s apartments.