A festival favourite last year, Frances Ha quickly earned a reputation for being Noah Baumbach's best yet and feeling like Wes Anderson plus Woody Allen. With those two filmmakers in mind, I couldn't have been more excited for it. I quite like Baumbach too, he's a welcome addition to the writing team with Wes Anderson's films, The Squid and The Whale is a great film and while Greenberg is only good, Greta Gerwig was a total highlight. He has an interesting quiet sense of drama that I can sometimes really connect to. However, Frances Ha was incredibly disappointing. Consistently mildly irritating is the phrase I'd use. It's far too in the middle, rarely approaching dramatic extremities. I didn't connect or empathise with Frances as she had very little at stake and little to do in general.
It's a film that thinks its more clever than it is. I didn't laugh once. While the dry jokes may be funny on paper, the deliveries never clicked and it's too quirky for its own good. Unfortunately the acting and cinematography are just too amateuristic. It feels more like a student film than anything from a professional. Maybe it's the choppy editing that killed it most with strange montages that don't have a sense of time of place resulting in it feeling disorientating. But then, these aspect give it a naive impish charm much like the protagonist, however it's just too self-aware for me. The thing about Frances Ha is that it definitely comes from a very genuine place. This isn't forced twee and that stops it from being cringeworthy, but that doesn't work for everyone.
I had to rewatch The Royal Tenenbaums straight after to make sure my sense of quirky humour was still in tact and in doing so, I realized what Frances Ha was lacking (as well as appreciating Tenenbaums more than ever). It lacks tragedy. What makes all Wes Anderson films work is the deep rooted emotion behind its quirkiness. Anderson puts them in this world with their behaviour as a way of dealing with, for example, a great loss. Frances has none of this. She just glides through life and it isn't endearing behaviour. Maybe if she had something, it would be a better film, but this film will only strike a chord with few. Even so, like Baumbach's other films, I'll admit it has a great soundtrack. I discovered some of my favourite songs from Greenberg and Squid, maybe I'll revisit this soundtrack too.
6/10
It's a film that thinks its more clever than it is. I didn't laugh once. While the dry jokes may be funny on paper, the deliveries never clicked and it's too quirky for its own good. Unfortunately the acting and cinematography are just too amateuristic. It feels more like a student film than anything from a professional. Maybe it's the choppy editing that killed it most with strange montages that don't have a sense of time of place resulting in it feeling disorientating. But then, these aspect give it a naive impish charm much like the protagonist, however it's just too self-aware for me. The thing about Frances Ha is that it definitely comes from a very genuine place. This isn't forced twee and that stops it from being cringeworthy, but that doesn't work for everyone.
I had to rewatch The Royal Tenenbaums straight after to make sure my sense of quirky humour was still in tact and in doing so, I realized what Frances Ha was lacking (as well as appreciating Tenenbaums more than ever). It lacks tragedy. What makes all Wes Anderson films work is the deep rooted emotion behind its quirkiness. Anderson puts them in this world with their behaviour as a way of dealing with, for example, a great loss. Frances has none of this. She just glides through life and it isn't endearing behaviour. Maybe if she had something, it would be a better film, but this film will only strike a chord with few. Even so, like Baumbach's other films, I'll admit it has a great soundtrack. I discovered some of my favourite songs from Greenberg and Squid, maybe I'll revisit this soundtrack too.
6/10