Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen – USA) 98 minutes
Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (Nugu-ui ttal-do anin Haewon) (Hong Sang-soo – South Korea) 90 minutes
The auteur theory has fallen from grace in recent decades, even in its native France, but, for all its faults, it is still applicable to a fairly broad tranche of cinema, though little of it, admittedly, commercial. And, it must be remembered that finding common themes, styles and concerns through a director’s work is no guarantee of quality. Woody Allen is a case in point: barely a year has gone by over the past four decades where he has not turned out a film – his latest, Blue Jasmine, is his 43rd theatrical release. Allen’s industrial output is driven by treating his career as a job – he has never re-watched any of his films once the final cut is in the can. He famously works on set 9 to 5 whenever possible, and has never liked straying too far from Manhattan, though over the last decade he has broken with that habit.
An unfortunate side-effect of Allen’s prolificness has been quality control. Over the past two decades, his films have been of varying worth – ranging from the surprisingly smart (Match Point, You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger, Anything Else) to the unspeakably wretched (Scoop, Cassandra’s Dream, To Rome With Love). Still, regardless of its merits, every one is unmistakably a Woody Allen film; you might even say the inconsistency is proof of his status as a serious artist – who wouldn’t go like that if they cranked films out with such dizzying regularity? His recent films are far below the quality of his work in the late 1970s and 1980s, when the gags were far more polished and funnier, the characterisation more thorough and the films as a whole possessed of a breezy insouciance that is usually absent these days. But, given Woody’s longevity and the continuity of theme and style. apparent in his work over decades, you suspect that he was a second-rank filmmaker all along, no matter how much one might love Annie Hall, Broadway Danny Rose or Radio Days. They are better than his current work but their concerns are similarly limited. That is certainly how he sees it – he has often said that he has never produced a classic film to rival Citizen Kane or La Règle du jeu.
Blue Jasmine is Allen’s finest film in some years, but it is likely to be a false dawn like other bright moments in his recent filmography. It’s far from a perfect film but there is a surprising amount of meat to it. We first see the title character Jasmine on a flight from New York to San Francisco, talking incessantly to her neighbour, all the way through the airport. At first the glamour deficit between Cate Blanchett and an older unknown character actor suggests Jasmine is quite a big shot, but the veil falls when the other lady rushes away from her as soon as her luggage arrives on the carousel. It is a wonderfully economical way of dramatising Jasmine’s hyper-neurotic state and fall from grace while also being a ballsy way of introducing one’s star in such an unflattering light.
Jasmine is moving to the west coast to be with her half-sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), whom she wanted little to do with during her years married to hedge-fund guru Hal (Alec Baldwin). Now that Hal’s dodgy dealings have been rumbled by the Feds, Jasmine is trying to set herself up in life, having never worked for a living before. Blue-collar Ginger has split up with her ex-husband, Augie, who harbours resentment against both Jasmine and Hal over an ill-fated investment. She is now going out with Chilli (Bobby Canavale), whom Jasmine doesn’t care for much, calling him a carbon copy of Augie, and her derision is reciprocated in full.
Jasmine’s efforts to set herself up as an interior designer are stymied by lack of funds, her proclivity for pills and vodka martinis and her determinedness to wrench Ginger away from Chilli. When she meets a blue-nosed diplomat (a brilliantly smug Peter Sarsgaard) things appear to be looking up but her past, she finds, is never really past. Too often of late, the performances in Allen’s films have been cursory and obvious; here though they are a joy – true in energy and detail. Dice Clay in particular is excellent, as is Louis CK as a smooth-talking, ingenuous hi-fi salesman and Hawkins, a less hyper version of her down-to-earth Holly in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky. It is Blanchett that is the greatest of all though; her portrayal of the self-deluded pillar of entitlement that is Jasmine is masterful. It teeters on the brink between mocking humour and terrifying alienation and the film as a whole strikes this balance incredibly well. There are flaws certainly – Allen’s squares the problem of filming an American film outside New York for the first time by populating San Francisco with Brooklyners – but Blue Jasmine is a creditable return to form, possibly the last good film Allen will ever make.
Another prolific director is the Korean Hong Sang-soo – Nobody’s Daughter Haewon is his eleventh feature in as many years. His films are usually shot on the hoof, on low budgets and are deceptively light. They also resemble each other a lot, often featuring as lead character a sad-sack middle-aged film director suffering a pained comedy of manners due to his philandering with younger women. His latest film is a slight variation on that, with the younger woman, Haewon (Jeung Eun-chae) the central character; she has been having an on-off affair with one of her film lecturers, Seongjun (Lee Seon-gyun). The film starts with Haewon’s mother, whom she hasn’t seen in five years (this is never explained), announcing she is leaving for Canada and won’t be coming back. Haewon is a loner – she appears to have few friends (partly because of a failed relationship) and her supposed Eurasian parentage seems to bother some of her less enlightened classmates.
Like much of Hong’s work, Nobody’s Daughter Haewon is an intimiste chamber piece, with little of grand dramatic note happening. It is a succession of chance (or not so chance) encounters in the street, boozy, soju-sodden meals, and situations of sometimes excruciating embarrassment. Hong has a limited stylistic palette but it’s a very effective one – he favours sudden zooms which have a jarring effect similar to someone in your company acting unpredictably. His films are often brief slices of personal history, narrated in a voice-over that is palpably older and wiser, and while the humour is always to the fore, there is a bittersweet melancholy underpinning it.
There are also things in the film that seem at first throwaway but which upon reflection appear to be more significant. An example in Haewon is an encounter in the opening moments with Jane Birkin, who is asking for directions, and who tells Haewon she has similar features to her own daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg. Upon first sight, it looks like a pointless gimmick, a tacked-on cameo that is an echo of Hong’s previous film In Another Country, which featured Isabelle Huppert adrift in Korea, armed only with bad English to negotiate. Birkin’s cameo soon acquires a deeper meaning though when we realise how alone Haewon, a young woman both beautiful and smart, is in the world, and why has her own mother not been in touch with her for five years? Nobody’s Daughter Haewon is yet another limpid, economical work from Hong Sang-soo that does a lot with very little. Though a regular at Cannes in recent years, Hong has failed to impress English-speaking critics much. He is adulated in France though (hence Birkin and Huppert’s collaboration, and his excellent 2008 film Night and Day was set in Paris), which is not surprising. More than any director currently working, he resembles the late Éric Rohmer. Hong Sang-soo’s deftly amusing chamber pieces show him to be a worthy successor to a New Wave great.
Showing posts with label comedy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label comedy. Show all posts
Monday, October 21, 2013
Sunday, September 01, 2013
Girl Most Likely & The Purge
Girl Most Likely (Shari Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini – USA) 103 minutes
The Purge (James DeMonaco – USA) 85 minutes
Two years on from Bridesmaids, Kristin Wiig returns in a vaguely similar scenario. Wiig plays Imogene, a failed (or rather never-made-it) playwright who gets dumped by her boyfriend (Brian Petsos) and loses her magazine job on the same day. Having faked a suicide attempt to try to win him back, she is abandoned by her Manhattan society friends and forced into the care of her long-estranged mother (Annette Bening) back in the Jersey Shore town she grew up in. Living with permatanned slot-machine-addict Zelda is Imogene’s apparently autistic crab-obsessed brother Ralph (Christopher Fitzgerald), Zelda’s younger shadowy lover (a very funny Matt Dillon on auto-pilot), and a lodger (Darren Criss, from Glee) who performs in a Backstreet Boys tribute band in Atlantic City. Imogene has not so much moved locale as shifted from one TV show to another – Sex and the City in the morning, generic sitcom in the evening.
Imogene is determined to get back to Manhattan but finds obstacles in her way, not least being without a car or money. She also learns that, contrary to what Zelda always told her, her father did not die during an operation when she was a child but left the family in a mutually-agreed divorce. This gives her two goals to accomplish before the end of the film but it doesn’t really give Girl Most Likely any more direction. Wiig is excellent as ever, as are Dillon (who claims to be a CIA agent) and Bening, a revelation as a brash blue-collar mom, and there are some hilarious scenes, such as when Imogene, on a whim decides to steal a book from the local library and then when, after a traffic accident, she encounters a cop who turns out to be someone whose invitation to the prom she once spurned.
The promise though is quickly squandered in favour of a despairingly conservative cleaving to formula. The film offers up a crude dichotomy between the classy but cultured New York high life Imogene has enjoyed and the trashy provincialism of her home town. It is a Manicheanism that you know is going to get flipped on its head, allowing the film to both sneer and laud the New Jersey rubes. There is a similar liberty taken with Ralph, Imogene’s asocial brother; it’s a bit of a condescending cliché, at this stage, for comedy screenwriters to use people with mild disabilities for quirkiness, and it quickly becomes clear that Ralph’s main use for screenwriter Michelle Morgan is the human carapace he has built which will serve mechanically as a plot device later in the film. Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, who made a creditable adaptation of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, are as far from their documentary roots as possible here. It’s a shame, as you would not have to change much in Girl Most Likely to make it a good film, nor would you risk alienating its intended audience. As it stands though, it lacks the underlying toughness that made Bridesmaids one of the best comedies of recent years. A comic performer as able as Wiig deserves better.
Ten years in the future, after a calamitous second economic crash and social upheaval, the United States government, under the guidance of its ‘new founding fathers’, has got the situation under control. The main tool of social regulation is an annual event called ‘The Purge’ where one night, for twelve hours, all crime, including rape and murder, is legal. Of course, the main object of this state-sanctioned crimewave is the underclass, whose troublesome presence is weeded out by their better-armed and better-protected betters.
‘The Purge’ is staged as part hurricane to be leisurely ‘ridden out’, part Superbowl party; the film centres on one family, the Sandins who are staying in this year, celebrating father James (Ethan Hawke) topping his company’s sales figures. The product he sells is the very hi-tech home security system that he activates to protect the home for the evening. The family sit down to dinner, prepared by mother Mary (Lena Headey), who proudly declares there to be ‘no carbs’ in it; it’s a foreshadowing of the sterilised, unblemished society The Purge intends to facilitate. Unfortunately, the film’s social commentary, which itself carries an echo of JG Ballard’s Super-Cannes (in which the wealthy cadres of a gated business park are prescribed recreational violence as part of their therapy), is rarely so succinct. The radio and TV voiceovers labour the point of class-refracted violence being the fuel that feeds social ‘cohesion’ and when a group of ghoulish youngsters appear at the Sandins’ front door, looking for a working-class black passer-by whom James’ son has let in, their villainy is emphasised by their leader wearing a preppy school blazer.
But ultimately what sinks The Purge is the film’s formal and technical ineptitude. This is strange given DeMonaco wrote the screenplay to Jean-François Richet’s effective remake of Assault on Precinct 13 and the film is produced by the stable that made the Paranormal Activity films. This ought to provide fertile conditions for a house-under-siege film but the action is quickly smothered in a medley of wearisomely predictable sequences that are all resolved by deis ex machina that are so mechanical their clunking machinery can be heard a mile away. Likewise, too little is made, too late, of the possibility of settling of scores, of the likelihood that the purge might operate within social classes as well as across then. The Purge has an interesting premise but it rarely explores the manifold ramifications of its central idea and ideas, being too happy to settle for cheap thrills.
The Purge (James DeMonaco – USA) 85 minutes
Two years on from Bridesmaids, Kristin Wiig returns in a vaguely similar scenario. Wiig plays Imogene, a failed (or rather never-made-it) playwright who gets dumped by her boyfriend (Brian Petsos) and loses her magazine job on the same day. Having faked a suicide attempt to try to win him back, she is abandoned by her Manhattan society friends and forced into the care of her long-estranged mother (Annette Bening) back in the Jersey Shore town she grew up in. Living with permatanned slot-machine-addict Zelda is Imogene’s apparently autistic crab-obsessed brother Ralph (Christopher Fitzgerald), Zelda’s younger shadowy lover (a very funny Matt Dillon on auto-pilot), and a lodger (Darren Criss, from Glee) who performs in a Backstreet Boys tribute band in Atlantic City. Imogene has not so much moved locale as shifted from one TV show to another – Sex and the City in the morning, generic sitcom in the evening.
Imogene is determined to get back to Manhattan but finds obstacles in her way, not least being without a car or money. She also learns that, contrary to what Zelda always told her, her father did not die during an operation when she was a child but left the family in a mutually-agreed divorce. This gives her two goals to accomplish before the end of the film but it doesn’t really give Girl Most Likely any more direction. Wiig is excellent as ever, as are Dillon (who claims to be a CIA agent) and Bening, a revelation as a brash blue-collar mom, and there are some hilarious scenes, such as when Imogene, on a whim decides to steal a book from the local library and then when, after a traffic accident, she encounters a cop who turns out to be someone whose invitation to the prom she once spurned.
The promise though is quickly squandered in favour of a despairingly conservative cleaving to formula. The film offers up a crude dichotomy between the classy but cultured New York high life Imogene has enjoyed and the trashy provincialism of her home town. It is a Manicheanism that you know is going to get flipped on its head, allowing the film to both sneer and laud the New Jersey rubes. There is a similar liberty taken with Ralph, Imogene’s asocial brother; it’s a bit of a condescending cliché, at this stage, for comedy screenwriters to use people with mild disabilities for quirkiness, and it quickly becomes clear that Ralph’s main use for screenwriter Michelle Morgan is the human carapace he has built which will serve mechanically as a plot device later in the film. Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, who made a creditable adaptation of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, are as far from their documentary roots as possible here. It’s a shame, as you would not have to change much in Girl Most Likely to make it a good film, nor would you risk alienating its intended audience. As it stands though, it lacks the underlying toughness that made Bridesmaids one of the best comedies of recent years. A comic performer as able as Wiig deserves better.
Ten years in the future, after a calamitous second economic crash and social upheaval, the United States government, under the guidance of its ‘new founding fathers’, has got the situation under control. The main tool of social regulation is an annual event called ‘The Purge’ where one night, for twelve hours, all crime, including rape and murder, is legal. Of course, the main object of this state-sanctioned crimewave is the underclass, whose troublesome presence is weeded out by their better-armed and better-protected betters.
‘The Purge’ is staged as part hurricane to be leisurely ‘ridden out’, part Superbowl party; the film centres on one family, the Sandins who are staying in this year, celebrating father James (Ethan Hawke) topping his company’s sales figures. The product he sells is the very hi-tech home security system that he activates to protect the home for the evening. The family sit down to dinner, prepared by mother Mary (Lena Headey), who proudly declares there to be ‘no carbs’ in it; it’s a foreshadowing of the sterilised, unblemished society The Purge intends to facilitate. Unfortunately, the film’s social commentary, which itself carries an echo of JG Ballard’s Super-Cannes (in which the wealthy cadres of a gated business park are prescribed recreational violence as part of their therapy), is rarely so succinct. The radio and TV voiceovers labour the point of class-refracted violence being the fuel that feeds social ‘cohesion’ and when a group of ghoulish youngsters appear at the Sandins’ front door, looking for a working-class black passer-by whom James’ son has let in, their villainy is emphasised by their leader wearing a preppy school blazer.
But ultimately what sinks The Purge is the film’s formal and technical ineptitude. This is strange given DeMonaco wrote the screenplay to Jean-François Richet’s effective remake of Assault on Precinct 13 and the film is produced by the stable that made the Paranormal Activity films. This ought to provide fertile conditions for a house-under-siege film but the action is quickly smothered in a medley of wearisomely predictable sequences that are all resolved by deis ex machina that are so mechanical their clunking machinery can be heard a mile away. Likewise, too little is made, too late, of the possibility of settling of scores, of the likelihood that the purge might operate within social classes as well as across then. The Purge has an interesting premise but it rarely explores the manifold ramifications of its central idea and ideas, being too happy to settle for cheap thrills.
Tuesday, July 09, 2013
Two US Indie Comedies
Your Sister’s Sister (Lynn Shelton – USA) 90 minutes
Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach – USA) 86 minutes
At some point about a decade ago, American Indie films stopped looking like Indie films – or at least what they looked like back in the 80s and 90s. This was largely because independent filmmaking became co-opted by off-shoots of Hollywood studios and increasingly came to appear like Sundance product with beefed-up production values, stars appearing for scale and more ambitious subject matter and themes. In the past couple of years, no doubt because of America’s rickety economy and a consequent parsimony in Hollywood, we are beginning to see a return of films that look like they might have been made in the heyday of John Sayles, Hal Hartley or early Gus Van Sant.
Your Sister’s Sister, by Lynn Shelton, director of the 2009 comedy Humpday is one such film. It is essentially a three-hander, set in Washington state (Shelton lives in Seattle, but it is curious how US Indie films seem to set themselves apart from Hollywood by looking almost Canadian). Mark Duplass (from Humpday) plays Jack, a humorous but depressive thirty-something, struggling to come to terms with the death of his brother. His best friend (also his brother’s ex) Iris (Emily Blunt) suggests he take some time out at her parent’s holiday home on an island off the Seattle coast. When he arrives there though, he finds Iris’ sister Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt), who has just walked out on her neglectful girlfriend. After getting drunk together, the two end up sleeping with each other, only for Iris to arrive unannounced the next morning. Jack and Hannah agree not to let her know what happened but that is not going to be too easy.
It starts off very well, with Jack dyspeptically scorning the fellow attendees at a memorial gathering for his brother; he counters a heart-warming tale of the dead man’s altruism after watching Hotel Rwanda with one of his brother’s Damascene conversion from bully to nice guy after watching Revenge of the Nerds (!) Duplass is excellent in the role, harbouring pain, anger and self-deprecation, and Shelton’s script shrewdly withholds much information (we never learn, for instance, how his brother died), leaving us to puzzle over what exactly is bringing him down. DeWitt is also good, being a rare example of an actress in an American film that talks like American women one might know in real life. She is bright, sassy and talkative. Only Blunt, with her imported British accent that is explained away in the script, is a bit flat.
But where the first half of the film is a sparky dark comedy, it descends into something a lot more formulaic once the fateful copulation takes place. What might have been an interesting comedy of manners is squandered in a series of unconvincing disputes and the crisis is resolved far too easily. The turn the film takes is catastrophic, and I don’t mean that in the Shakespearean sense. It is also, after the initial edgy promise of a film exploring sexual politics, grief and betrayal, despairingly conservative, saccharine even. A clear sign of a writer-director not really knowing how to follow through on an interesting premise.
Noah Baumbach’s third feature, shot in high-contrast black and white, is another Indie film that looks like a throwback to a couple of decades ago. Written with the film’s star (and Baumbach’s real-life partner) Greta Gerwig, Frances Ha is a light but deftly nuanced portrait of a hyperactive Millenial New Yorker. 28-year-old Frances is struggling as a dance company apprentice, forever hoping for the big opening that might free her from the impecunious existence she leads. She gets dumped by her boyfriend when she declines to move in with him due to her loyalty to her flatmate Sophie (Mickey Sumner), only to be then cast aside by her shortly afterwards.
The film from there on is a low-rent picaresque, where Frances, rudderless (or ‘undateable’ as her new flatmates Lev and Dan call her), drifts from one precarious living situation to another, sub-letting, couch-surfing and eventually going back to her alma mater Vassar to try and earn some extra cash. Frances is surrounded by people who have money but her own protestations of poverty are dismissed – Dan says at one point, ‘to say you’re poor is an insult to people who are really poor’. That’s a fair point but the film is unusual in its portrayal of a college graduate who is struggling to get things off the ground. Even Indie films rarely concern themselves too much with things like personal economics, though many of the people involved in their making have probably known even at least temporary hardship.
Gerwig, who was last seen in Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress and Woody Allen’s utterly forgettable To Rome with Love, is endearingly fantastic as Frances. She is daffy but confident; sprightly but self-doubting. Her elastic, effervescent performance is likely to divide people as much as Sally Hawkins’ in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky did, but those who watch it with a bit of patience will be rewarded. I don’t know how much of a market there is for it, but Gerwig is a comedy all-rounder, equally at home with gangly slapstick as she is with deadpan repartee. The film is very built around her but she emerges as an undisputed star from it.
Baumbach, who probably could have easily made a more commercial offering, also deserves credit for persisting with a type of guerrilla filmmaking that produces unexpectedly fresh results (much of it was shot on the hoof, without permits). Frances Ha is a light comedy but it inhabits its space very convincingly and its brilliant portrayal of such a great character offsets the rushed nature of its narrative (the end, in particular, is thrown together a bit too easily). There are touches of Jim Jarmusch (when he was still an interesting filmmaker) to it but the main reference is Truffaut. There are constant allusions to him in the film, which is strewn with pieces of Georges Delarue’s music from Truffaut’s films. Like Truffaut, Baumbach is good at making the trivial significant; he even short-circuits the usual American fawning over Paris by having Frances spend two days there on a whim only to become even more alienated there. Frances Ha does not take itself very seriously but it is a very good example of serious comedy. Unlike Baumbach’s sometime collaborator, Wes Anderson, he manages to stay just the right side of mannered. A very funny, deceptively simple film that is likely to be one of the best American comedies this year.
Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach – USA) 86 minutes
At some point about a decade ago, American Indie films stopped looking like Indie films – or at least what they looked like back in the 80s and 90s. This was largely because independent filmmaking became co-opted by off-shoots of Hollywood studios and increasingly came to appear like Sundance product with beefed-up production values, stars appearing for scale and more ambitious subject matter and themes. In the past couple of years, no doubt because of America’s rickety economy and a consequent parsimony in Hollywood, we are beginning to see a return of films that look like they might have been made in the heyday of John Sayles, Hal Hartley or early Gus Van Sant.
Your Sister’s Sister, by Lynn Shelton, director of the 2009 comedy Humpday is one such film. It is essentially a three-hander, set in Washington state (Shelton lives in Seattle, but it is curious how US Indie films seem to set themselves apart from Hollywood by looking almost Canadian). Mark Duplass (from Humpday) plays Jack, a humorous but depressive thirty-something, struggling to come to terms with the death of his brother. His best friend (also his brother’s ex) Iris (Emily Blunt) suggests he take some time out at her parent’s holiday home on an island off the Seattle coast. When he arrives there though, he finds Iris’ sister Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt), who has just walked out on her neglectful girlfriend. After getting drunk together, the two end up sleeping with each other, only for Iris to arrive unannounced the next morning. Jack and Hannah agree not to let her know what happened but that is not going to be too easy.
It starts off very well, with Jack dyspeptically scorning the fellow attendees at a memorial gathering for his brother; he counters a heart-warming tale of the dead man’s altruism after watching Hotel Rwanda with one of his brother’s Damascene conversion from bully to nice guy after watching Revenge of the Nerds (!) Duplass is excellent in the role, harbouring pain, anger and self-deprecation, and Shelton’s script shrewdly withholds much information (we never learn, for instance, how his brother died), leaving us to puzzle over what exactly is bringing him down. DeWitt is also good, being a rare example of an actress in an American film that talks like American women one might know in real life. She is bright, sassy and talkative. Only Blunt, with her imported British accent that is explained away in the script, is a bit flat.
But where the first half of the film is a sparky dark comedy, it descends into something a lot more formulaic once the fateful copulation takes place. What might have been an interesting comedy of manners is squandered in a series of unconvincing disputes and the crisis is resolved far too easily. The turn the film takes is catastrophic, and I don’t mean that in the Shakespearean sense. It is also, after the initial edgy promise of a film exploring sexual politics, grief and betrayal, despairingly conservative, saccharine even. A clear sign of a writer-director not really knowing how to follow through on an interesting premise.
Noah Baumbach’s third feature, shot in high-contrast black and white, is another Indie film that looks like a throwback to a couple of decades ago. Written with the film’s star (and Baumbach’s real-life partner) Greta Gerwig, Frances Ha is a light but deftly nuanced portrait of a hyperactive Millenial New Yorker. 28-year-old Frances is struggling as a dance company apprentice, forever hoping for the big opening that might free her from the impecunious existence she leads. She gets dumped by her boyfriend when she declines to move in with him due to her loyalty to her flatmate Sophie (Mickey Sumner), only to be then cast aside by her shortly afterwards.
The film from there on is a low-rent picaresque, where Frances, rudderless (or ‘undateable’ as her new flatmates Lev and Dan call her), drifts from one precarious living situation to another, sub-letting, couch-surfing and eventually going back to her alma mater Vassar to try and earn some extra cash. Frances is surrounded by people who have money but her own protestations of poverty are dismissed – Dan says at one point, ‘to say you’re poor is an insult to people who are really poor’. That’s a fair point but the film is unusual in its portrayal of a college graduate who is struggling to get things off the ground. Even Indie films rarely concern themselves too much with things like personal economics, though many of the people involved in their making have probably known even at least temporary hardship.
Gerwig, who was last seen in Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress and Woody Allen’s utterly forgettable To Rome with Love, is endearingly fantastic as Frances. She is daffy but confident; sprightly but self-doubting. Her elastic, effervescent performance is likely to divide people as much as Sally Hawkins’ in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky did, but those who watch it with a bit of patience will be rewarded. I don’t know how much of a market there is for it, but Gerwig is a comedy all-rounder, equally at home with gangly slapstick as she is with deadpan repartee. The film is very built around her but she emerges as an undisputed star from it.
Baumbach, who probably could have easily made a more commercial offering, also deserves credit for persisting with a type of guerrilla filmmaking that produces unexpectedly fresh results (much of it was shot on the hoof, without permits). Frances Ha is a light comedy but it inhabits its space very convincingly and its brilliant portrayal of such a great character offsets the rushed nature of its narrative (the end, in particular, is thrown together a bit too easily). There are touches of Jim Jarmusch (when he was still an interesting filmmaker) to it but the main reference is Truffaut. There are constant allusions to him in the film, which is strewn with pieces of Georges Delarue’s music from Truffaut’s films. Like Truffaut, Baumbach is good at making the trivial significant; he even short-circuits the usual American fawning over Paris by having Frances spend two days there on a whim only to become even more alienated there. Frances Ha does not take itself very seriously but it is a very good example of serious comedy. Unlike Baumbach’s sometime collaborator, Wes Anderson, he manages to stay just the right side of mannered. A very funny, deceptively simple film that is likely to be one of the best American comedies this year.
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