A story that follows a New York woman (who doesn't really have an apartment), apprentices for a dance company (though she's not really a dancer), and throws herself headlong into her dreams, even as their possible reality dwindles.
Gerwig keeps you on side and rooting for Frances to get her act together in what becomes an affectionate salute to messy lives, an endearing underachiever and a New York state of mind.
Baumbach and Gerwig have co-written a film about the point when spontaneous, giddy arrested adolescence ceases to be endearing and threatens to be annoying. And as I said, it is a surprising film.
Although the monochrome photography will invite comparisons with Manhattan, Frances Ha is closer in spirit to Godard than Woody Allen. Anchored by a charming performance from Greta Gerwig, it’s as light and breezy as a walk in Central Park, and just as refreshing.
It will be an acquired taste for many though, depending on how you take to the defiantly quirky and hapless Frances.
It's a likable movie, with some nice moments of both comedy and pathos, and beautifully shot, but for me the reverence for its heroine was not completely earned, and the arrowhead was missing: the decisive jab of satire, of insight, of love.
At 27 Frances may worry she's "undateable", but this sweetly melancholic film knows otherwise, right down to the final moments that explain the title. Not funny ha-ha, but in the Baumbach way, funny ha.
Annie Hall meets Friends.
There's little doubt that many people will find her insufferable, and almost everyone will experience moments of acute discomfort. But this is a wonderful performance that never becomes ingratiating.
Baumbach uses Frances’s various abodes to demarcate her baffled progress through New York’s boho hinterland and watching her trying to figure out who she is a rare treat.
Noah Baumbach on Frances Ha: 'I wanted it to feel like a first film'
Interview: Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig discuss making Frances Ha
General release. Check local listings for show times.
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