Frances Ha

Dir: Noah Baumbach

USA

2012

86

15

Frances Ha is a witty apparently feather-light vehicle for co-writer and star Greta Gerwig (Baghead, Damsels in Distress). Initially this seems like another in her growing line of trademark, near typecast, kooky feisty twenty-something dreamer characters trying to make it in New York.

But Mumblecore grows up in this sensitive portrait of an ordinary person struggling in a tough world to pay her rent in the least humiliating manner she can manage. Told with a lightness of touch which belies its sobering heart, we watch as Gerwig’s dream career as a dancer slips from her grasp while she waits on tables and wonders what on earth to do next. Is her life over before it has even had a chance to begin?

Easily Noah Baumbach’s most effective and artistically successful film since The Squid and the Whale, it’s a small, perfectly formed and very enjoyable channelling of the French New Wave and 70s Woody Allen. Baumbach fashions a gentle small film whose substance sneaks up, catching its audience almost unaware under a welter of chutzpah, gags and youthful vigour.

Booking Information

Release Date

26 July 2013

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