Frances Ha

I am crazy about movies quoting other movies.
Because I feel the joy of having found soul mates, people who go through their lives constantly thinking about cinema, talking about cinema, making cinema referring to other cinema. Basically, cinema freaks like me, who can’t conceive life without the filter of movies.
When I watch films made by people like this, I feel like they’re telling me: Hey you, welcome home!
It doesn’t happen every day, but it does happen.
It is something I have constantly felt looking at the last Noah Baumbach’s movie, Frances Ha, written by him and by the main actress of the film, Greta Gerwig. 

The two, who already worked together in the previous Baumbach's movie, Greenberg,

are now a couple à la ville.

Sophie (Mickey Sumner) and Frances (Greta Gerwig)

Frances Ha tells the story of Frances, a 27 years old girl who lives in Brooklyn together with her best friend, Sophie. While Sophie works for a publishing house, Frances has a precarious job: she is an apprentice dancer who dreams to integrate a dancing company but always fails at it. When Sophie announces to her that she is moving to Manhattan with another friend, Frances's world starts progressively to collapse. She looses the apartment, the job and, after a monumental fight, also her best friend. It will take time, to Frances, to put together all the pieces that will bring her to become Frances Ha.

New York filmed in black and white: it is so Manhattanesque that you almost believe to have heard a Gershwin music somewhere, but instead, quite surprisingly, what you really hear is a piece called “L’école Buissonière” by Jean Constantin, taken from Les 400 Coups by François Truffaut. The whole music, as a matter of fact, is taken from Nouvelle Vague films, with a prominent presence of Georges Delerue and a hint of Antoine Duhamel. 
I have prevented you: this is home.
It is home to the point that, when Frances starts walking/dancing on the streets of New York on Modern Love by David Bowie, the image of Denis Lavant in Mauvais Sang by Leos Carax naturally arises, overlapping the one on the screen. 

Modern Love - Baumbach Version

Modern Love - Carax Version

And how is it possible not to think about Samy Frey, Claude Brasseur and Anna Karina in Bande à Part by Jean-Luc Godard when Frances is sharing the apartment together with Lev and Benji? Nobody will be surprised if these three would start running together in the corridors of the MET…

Bande à part - Baumbach Version

Bande à part - Godard Version

... and, of course, during her short trip to Paris, somebody wants to invite Frances to a party where there is a guy "Who looks like Jean-Pierre Léaud!"

Thus said, Frances Ha is not a good movie because of its hommages to the Nouvelle Vague universe. You can (of course!) see the movie completely unaware of them and enjoy it immensely. Frances character is super interesting: captured in one of those weird moments of life where adulthood should be installed but in fact is not already there, this young woman invades the screen with her clumsy gestures, her free-flowing monologues, her disarming need to be loved and to find her place in the world. Slightly irritating at first, gripping while struggling to survive among many difficulties, absolutely charming in her candid attempts to assert herself. The moment where, completely drunk, she explains what a relationship should be for her, is a little masterpiece, and Gerwig is astonishing in this made-to-measure role.
But be careful: this is not a rom com or a chick flick, this is a modern movie about a young woman whose first need is not to find a man but to find herself. 
Undatable, as her friend Benji keeps describing her? 
Maybe, but also very irresistible!

Dreams burn (but in ashes are gold)

I went to see a couple of American pictures last week, and I was quite convinced that I would talk about one of them, Life during wartime by Todd Solondz, but it turns out (as it often happens in life, when you expect one thing and you get another) that I prefer to talk about Greenberg by Noah Baumbach.

I always thought that cinema is one of the best cures against loneliness. You sit down in a place together with other people (and already this means that you are not alone in this world), and sometimes, as a nice bonus, you see on screen a character whose life, whose thoughts, whose ideas say so much to you and/or to what you are going through in a particular moment of your life, that you immediately feel less lost. I don’t know exactly at which point of your life you can consider yourself when you feel very close to a character played by Ben Stiller who’s just got out from a mental hospital (probably not the best one of your entire existence), but that’s what happened to me the other day.

Roger Greenberg is a forty something, once a musician now a carpenter, who arrives from New York to Los Angeles to spend few weeks at his brother’s place (while he and his family are on holiday in Vietnam). Besides taking care of a dog and building a little doghouse, Roger has nothing to do. This gives him plenty of time to catch up with some old mates (he has been living in Los Angeles before moving to the Big Apple 15 years before) and even with his ex-girlfriend, Beth. This also gives him the opportunity to meet Florence, the personal assistant of his brother, with whom he starts a weird relationship. Through different events, Roger’s complex personality and various problems (he has spent some time in a mental institution before his trip to LA) become quite clear to everybody (audience included). In particular, the discussions with Ivan, his oldest friend, oblige Roger to call his past and his decisions into question. The final results of this painful process are probably not the ones he was hoping for, but Greenberg eventually finds the strength to start a new (and happier?) phase of his life.

Noah Baumbach is a very subtle and brilliant film-maker (The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the wedding) and screenwriter (his has written two movies together with Wes Anderson), but I think Greenberg is his most mature and compelling work (the story has been created together with his wife, actress Jennifer Jason-Leigh, who also plays Beth in the movie).

Greenberg, the best performance of Ben Stiller’s caree, is not a very nice person. He is gloomy, unsocial, unfriendly, self-centred, complicated. His life is a mess. At 40, he has no family, no relationship, no real job and not many friends. He is not at ease with world and the world is not at ease with him (the letters of complaint he is writing all along the movie to different American companies are hilarious but also quite disturbing). He wants to better understand his past hoping that this will help him to better understand his present, but his clumsy attempts to do so turn into failures (the scene where he says to his ex-girlfriend that they could have had children together many years before and she looks at him in disbelief is a good example). Florence’s character (beautifully played by new-comer Greta Gerwig) is completely different: she is naïve, generous, friendly, curious, and cheerful. She is a mess too, but she has the right to be a mess: she is young. She is also the one who immediately understands Greenberg’s real nature and his fragility (and loves him for that). And I can’t forget to mention Ivan (great, great, great Rhys Ifans, I love this actor!), the perfect counter-balance to Greenberg’s incapability of accepting changes imposed by ageing.

I have seen this picture with some (younger) friends and I was absolutely aware, since the very beginning, that we were looking two different movies or, at least, that my perception of this movie would have been completely different from theirs.

The difference lies in our gap of 15 years (this was especially clear when, at Greenberg’s idea of having Duran Duran as the perfect music for a coke party, I madly laughed and they didn’t).

Of course! They are twenty something, they still have to make one of those fatal mistakes you pay very high, and they still have to take one of those bad decisions, the ones able to ruin your career or your private life.

At forty, well, you usually had the chance to have made at least one of those stupid things.

So, while they were probably trying to understand the meaning of Ivan’s statement: Life is wasted on young!, I was already agreeing to Greenberg’s bitter reply: Life is wasted on people!