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<\/a>But take poor Generation Y. They\u2019ve been peppered with messages since the cradle about being whatever they want to be, doing whatever they want to do: Dancer, Director, President of the United States of America. Generation Y were brought up on the premise that there would always continue to be an upward swing in the Gross Happiness Product.\u00a0 However, this sunny optimism forgot something: the rueful truth that at some point, High Expectations would outstrip the grim matter-of-factness of Reality. Generation Y, unfortunately were misled when they were told that They Could Have It All.<\/p>\n
All this is a roundabout way of saying that Frances Ha<\/em>, the new film by writer\/director Noah Baumbach captures, in painfully lucid fashion, the malaise of the present age. It\u2019s quite an impressive achievement: Baumbach, born in 1969, is very good at plumbing the depths of generational angst, but usually from within his own social and chronological milieu. (The Squid and The Whale<\/em>, which earned him a scriptwriting Oscar nod in 2006, is loosely based on his own experiences as a teenager; the underrated ennui of Greenberg is very much a Generation X \u2013 albeit a rather privileged Generation X \u2013 statement.)<\/p>\n The story runs thus: Frances is 27, a dancer, flat-sharing in New York with Sophie, her best friend from college who works in publishing. Social life is a frenetic whirl; in moments of quiescence, she and Sophie lie in bed and dream about when Frances becomes a renown dancer and Sophie commissions a huge tome about her life and influences. Life is good, it seems.<\/p>\n Except that it\u2019s not. Frances is an apprentice at her dance company with little chance of making it onto the main roster; Sophie is about to move out and move in with her boyfriend, who does strange but richly remunerative things in the banking world. Frances splits up with her boyfriend over nothing; she has no money. Benjy, her new flatmate \u2013 who is writing a sequel to Gremlins (of all things!) \u2013 describes her as \u201cundateable.\u201d And he means it in a kind way. Frances, it\u2019s fair to say, is in a bit of a mess.<\/p>\n Noah Baumbach says he chose to shoot Frances Ha<\/em> in black and white because he wanted to boil the story \u201cdown to its barest bones,\u201d giving it a sense of \u201cimmediate nostalgia.\u201d It works, albeit in curious fashion. The camera work \u2013 shot on digital, with a naturalistic vibe, but often over multiple takes \u2013 has moments of rawness that bring Truffant to mind, particularly Jules et Jim<\/em>. But because Frances and her milieu are so very much of the moment, it creates a strange sensibility. Like watching your life on the Biography Channel, I think. The unsubtle cinematography prompts us to pay close attention to the script, which is a good thing. It is sharp and funny, the whimsy that meanders through the film balanced off by corrective moments of acute social embarrassment.<\/p>\n But it is Greta Gerwig\u2019s performance as Frances that makes the real difference between interesting observational piece, and literate intelligent filmmaking. Gerwig \u2013 who co-wrote the script \u2013 has a curious physical presence, all flailing arms and physical gawkiness. She falls over, leaves her room in a state of perpetual untidiness, misreads cues and body language. She doesn\u2019t really fit in, and because she tries so hard she makes matters even worse. But all this is played off against her facial language, which thanks to the monochrome medium is \u2013 as Baumbach proposes \u2013 stripped down to a minimum. She radiates eternal optimism, an openness stripped free of guile. Charlie Chaplin would be proud, I think.<\/p>\n Mind you, mindless optimism is not always the best solution for a problem like Frances. Matters turn from bad to worse, in no small part because she cannot permit herself to see her life for what it is. It is important to keep things in perspective: when she laments that she is poor, Benjy points out that she can\u2019t be \u201cpoor\u201d because she is educated, art-minded and white. It comes down to a matter of expectations versus reality, and her expectations are taking a real beating. After a disastrous dinner party, she impulsively flies to Paris for the weekend \u2013 what are credit cards for if not for maxing out on a whim? \u2013 to prove to herself that she can have the life she believes she ought to have, filled with fun and gaiety and spontaneity and creativity. The trip is a disaster, of course; that\u2019s the real tragedy. Later, she\u2019s offered an administrative job in her dance company, to tide her over whilst she works out her next professional steps. But she turns it down because it\u2019s a step back. She doesn\u2019t want to be the failure in the Having It All age.<\/p>\n If I were to reduce Frances Ha down to a single concept, I think I would go with the notion of understanding social capital. There are very subtle but rather telling clues scattered about the film that give us \u2013 if not Frances \u2013 some understanding about why things aren\u2019t working out. Frances Ha is rooted in a privileged, middle class setting, but Frances is not all of these things. She has the language and the props and the colour to fit in, but only up to a point. What she lacks the social safety net needed to negotiate the tangled world of misplaced expectations and unwanted reality. It\u2019s not very nice to say, but Frances Ha reinforces the uncomfortable truth that to have a full life in our self-regarding and consumeristic age, it helps\u00a0 if you are (1) At least slightly narcissistic and (2) Rich.<\/p>\n Frances Ha is a film about the travails of a lost generation; but it is more importantly a film about social privilege, or the lack of therein. Once one gets this point, it becomes very easy to cheer for Frances, hope that she learns to play the game on her own terms. She is a bit of a klutz, but she is well meaning and honest and just needs to teach herself to be true to herself. Setting one\u2019s expectations a bit lower is not necessarily the same as selling oneself short. Rather it\u2019s acknowledgement of lack of true access to the resources and connections, oft invisible, that one only commands when one belongs within a milieu. It isn\u2019t terribly fair: but then, as lots of 20-somethings and 30-somethings have come to find out, who said life was supposed to be fair?<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>