Noah Baumbach made the freest film of his career. The freedom belonged to the cinematography. Frances was inside it.
Apartment 1: Chinatown, with Sophie For belonging. For the version of adult life that looks exactly like the version you planned.
Apartment 2: Williamsburg, with the two men For proving the Chinatown version wasn’t the only version. For sleeping in someone else’s room and calling it momentum.
Apartment 3: Vassar, in the dorm, age twenty-seven For paying rent. For being the only person in the hallway who understands what the hallway is for.
Apartment 4: Sacramento, her childhood bedroom For nothing. Because there was nowhere else.
Apartment 5: Chinatown again, alone For the same thing as apartment one, but with the knowledge that the thing you were doing before is not the thing you are doing now, even if the address is the same.
This is not a map of New York. It is the film’s argument about what it means to move, which is not the same as what it means to arrive.
| Director | Noah Baumbach |
|---|---|
| Year | 2012 |
| Runtime | 86 minutes |
| Cast | Greta Gerwig, Mickey Sumner, Adam Driver |
| Award | Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay; New York Film Critics Circle, Best Film |
| Streaming | MUBI, Max |
Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (2012) follows Frances Halladay (Greta Gerwig), a twenty-seven-year-old aspiring dancer in New York, through the period after her best friend Sophie moves out of their shared apartment and into a different life — one with a boyfriend, a nicer address, a trajectory Frances cannot locate a version of herself inside. Frances moves through a succession of rooms and boroughs and a brief bewildering trip to Paris, dances, fails to dance, teaches children to dance, moves again. The film was shot in black and white by Sam Levy, written by Baumbach and Gerwig together, and received with an enthusiasm that the critical vocabulary of the time assembled around words like “luminous” and “alive” and “the most honest portrait of a certain kind of twenty-something woman in years.” It won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay and was named Best Film by the New York Film Critics Circle. The previous review on this blog argued that Frances Ha makes the same argument about millennial female restlessness as The Worst Person in the World but without a narrator, without chapters, without retrospective organisation — “the camera discovering what Frances’s life is about at the same time she does.” That was accurate about the narrative structure. What it was not, quite, was accurate about what the camera was doing while it was discovering.
The Worst Person in the World review argued that what distinguishes Frances Ha is its refusal to claim foreknowledge — the form and the content making the same argument simultaneously, neither arriving ahead of the other. This is true of Baumbach’s plotting, which follows Frances’s contingencies rather than imposing a shape on them. It is not true of his cinematography, which arrived at the film with its argument already formed. The black and white is not a choice Frances earns through the texture of her story. It is not a visual grammar that emerges from who she is or what she does. It is a choice Baumbach made about the kind of film he wanted to make — which is a film that looks like the New York films he loved before he made films, that places contemporary female experience inside a visual register borrowed from a specific tradition of American cinema, that says, through every frame’s luminous contrast and careful grain: this is the company we keep. That company is almost entirely male. The films the black and white invokes — the early Allen of Manhattan and Stardust Memories, the early Cassavetes, the mid-century New York of a certain cinephile memory — are films made by men about their own experience of a city they understood as their aesthetic property. Baumbach places Frances inside that inheritance, and the inheritance is generous to her story, and it is also not hers. She did not make the choice to live in black and white. She was placed there because the filmmaker loved what black and white did to New York, and Frances was in New York, and the love transferred by adjacency.
This matters most in the film’s most celebrated visual quality, which is the way New York looks in every exterior shot: the streets of Chinatown at night, the brownstone facades of the Upper West Side in flat afternoon light, the specific shimmer of a Manhattan block seen from a cab window. The city in Frances Ha is extraordinary. It is the most beautiful New York in contemporary American cinema. And its beauty is not Frances’s beauty — not the beauty of her experience of it, not the visual grammar of what it feels like to be her inside it. It is the beauty of a filmmaker who grew up watching a certain kind of New York film and wanted to make one, and whose love of the image preceded his love of the particular person the image contains. Frances moves through the beautiful city like a woman who does not know she is being photographed in black and white, which is because she doesn’t — and the gap between her story’s emotional register, which is warm and messy and unresolved, and the visual register the film places it inside, which is composed and historically self-conscious and beautiful in the way that homage is beautiful, is the gap the film cannot see because it is standing inside its own love of cinema.
Baumbach follows Frances without imposing a narrator or a chapter. He does impose black and white, which is a prior claim about the kind of story this is — made before Frances appeared, belonging to a tradition she did not choose.
Greta Gerwig is the film’s most complete argument against its own limitation. She plays Frances with a physical specificity so exact and so undecorated — the run that is almost a controlled fall, the way she fills a doorway with the energy of someone who arrived before she finished deciding to — that in every scene her presence threatens to break through the composed grain and simply be. There is a quality to Gerwig’s performance that black and white cannot fully contain: too much momentum, too much warmth, too much blood moving too fast. The film’s visual grammar is designed for stillness and reflection and the kind of melancholy that looks good in high contrast. Gerwig is designed for something more urgent, and the tension between her presence and the film’s aesthetic aspiration is sometimes the most honest thing on screen — the performer resisting the image the image is trying to make her into, without either of them knowing that is what is happening. The best scenes in Frances Ha are the ones where Gerwig’s energy is almost too much for the frame: the sprint down the street to Bowie, the dinner party where she talks too long and too much and the film lets her, the moment she tells the couple at the party that she lives in Chinatown “but not in a way that’s like, ‘I live in Chinatown.’” In those moments the black and white stops being a formal ambition and becomes simply the medium through which something real is moving at speed.
The final scene is where the film’s argument about itself lands, and where it cannot see what it has arrived at. Frances, now working as an administrator for the dance company rather than performing in it, is helping set up a showcase. She has arranged accommodation for visiting performers, written the programmes, organised the event — she has become the infrastructure for other people’s artistic ambition, which the film presents, with great warmth, as a form of arrival. She checks the mailbox label: her name, “Frances Halladay,” printed in full. She takes an envelope, folds it so the flap covers “Halladay,” and what remains is “Frances Ha.” The film’s title finally explains itself. The final shot holds her face — amused, satisfied, recognising something. The film reads this as the moment she becomes herself: the surplus, the abbreviation, the “Ha” that survives after everything else has been folded away. It is a beautiful scene. What it cannot see is what it is showing. Frances is standing in the lobby of a performance space, arranging a performance. She is doing, with slightly more institutional support, exactly what she was doing at the film’s opening — placing herself adjacent to dance, making the surrounding conditions for other people to perform, finding the version of her creative ambition that the world has room for. The film reads the folded envelope as her discovering her own name. It is equally a portrait of her discovering the terms of her accommodation. Both things are true. The film, which loves her too completely to hold both, can only see one.
The Worst Person in the World uses chapters and a narrator to organise Julie’s restlessness retrospectively. Frances Ha uses black and white to place Frances’s restlessness inside a prior aesthetic claim. Both films impose a structure on a woman’s experience that the woman did not choose and cannot see. Trier’s structure is visible, named, mounted on title cards. Baumbach’s is invisible, inherited, present in every frame before Frances arrives in any of them. The Worst Person review asked whether refusing the narrator was “more honest or less kind” than Trier’s approach. What the Frances Ha review can say, from inside the film rather than from outside it: the refusal of the narrator is a real formal generosity, and it arrives alongside a different imposition — the cinematographic decision that precedes the story, that was made in love for a tradition rather than in knowledge of a person, and that places Frances inside a New York that was always, in the films Baumbach loved, somebody else’s.
Frances Ha is the warmest film Baumbach has made and the one most completely inhabited by a performer who understood something about her own character that the film’s visual grammar was not built to hold. The black and white is beautiful. Gerwig is more beautiful, in the specific sense that her presence is more alive than any formal decision applied to it. The film knows this. It gives her the sprint and the dinner party and the name on the envelope. It cannot quite give her New York as her own, because it loved New York before she got there, and love that precedes its object is always slightly more about the lover than the loved.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
The Worst Person in the World (Joachim Trier, 2021): our review is on this blog — the film that imposes its structure visibly, in chapter titles and a narrator, where Baumbach imposes his invisibly, in cinematographic inheritance; the two films together are the most complete argument contemporary cinema has made about what it costs a filmmaker to love a woman’s story and what it means when the formal apparatus of that love belongs to a prior tradition.
Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979): the black and white New York film Frances Ha is explicitly in conversation with — Allen’s city, Allen’s visual grammar, Allen’s claim on the aesthetic register Baumbach inherits; the friction is that Manhattan is a film about a man’s love for a city and the women inside it, and placing Frances inside its visual language raises a question the film never asks: whose New York is this, and what does it cost Frances to live in it?
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