Frances Ha: Scripting that Dances and Drifts

Frances Ha is a comedy-drama directed by Noah Baumbach. It tells the story of Frances (Greta Gerwig), a 27-year-old aspiring ballet dancer with no money, no shifts at the dance company, and no apartment. The movie follows Frances from apartment to apartment, from city to city, and from friend to friend as she tries to get her life together.

The first words that come to mind when considering how to describe Frances Ha are “drifting” and “transient.” These two words could easily sum up the entire film. There is no real linear plotline for the audience to follow: the movie just sort of drifts seemingly wherever Baumbach wanted to take it until it reaches its conclusion. This is not necessarily bad. James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Arist As A Young Man is famously written in the stream of consciousness style, and Frances Ha is similar: it may not be linear, but it’s not completely illogical. Then there is Frances herself, a character who drifts between independence and codependence, between being charming and embarrassingly immature. Frances runs all over the world looking for herself and seems to have been quite swallowed up by her friendships and by her insistent need to belong to someone. Her friendship with Sophie (Mickey Sumner) seems to be of particular importance to her happiness and is possibly the worst example of Frances’ need to be codependent. Throughout the film, when talking about Sophie, she frequently follows her friend’s name with, “We’re the same person.” Frances’ life is further thrown off course partially by Sophie’s deepening commitment to her boyfriend, which pulls her further away from Frances. Despite her flaws, Frances is a funny, charming character, and Gerwig does an excellent job of acting in a film in which she plays the only lead role and is surrounded by (major) supporting characters.

Frances Ha takes its time dancing through many aspects of modern life: love, loss, ambition, disappointment, failure, and the ability to change. Drifting through a story often hurts a film – for Frances Ha this is not the case. Instead, the transience present in the movie is the result of Baumbach’s very clever representation of real life, in which we drift between moods and find ourselves moving from happy times to difficult ones with no warning or preamble. The connection between Frances and the audience comes largely from the sometimes-childish hope that Frances holds on to throughout the entire film. No matter what comes her way, Frances is literally dancing through life. Watching Frances dance through Chinatown to David Bowie’s “Modern Love” is a particularly endearing sight.

Although it can, for the viewer, be a bit disconcerting to be led wherever the actor and the director want to take you, it can also be somewhat comforting. Frances Ha is a charming, good-natured, “slice of life” kind of story that smartly brings the viewer through the ups and downs of the life of the modern generation. 

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