Under the Spotlight: Greta Gerwig’s charming performance in ‘Frances Ha’
There are few films that capture the mixed emotions that come with navigating your late 20s like Frances Ha, starring Greta Gerwig as the eponymous character. Directed by Noah Baumbach, Gerwig co-wrote the screenplay with the filmmaker before even agreeing to star in the leading role, yet it has since become her defining performance as an actor, full of wit, charm, and complexity.
Inspired by the French New Wave and New York stories that have defined cinema over the years, like Girlfriends and Annie Hall, the film follows Frances as she navigates life, with her friendship with Sophie becoming a prominent focus of the narrative. This is a story of wading through the murky waters of adulthood, when you’re old enough to theoretically have it all figured out, but you still feel like a teenager within. Frances is 27, and her closest companion is her college friend Sophie, but when she discovers that Sophie is moving out, the protagonist is suddenly left feeling lost and alone.
Looking for a new place to stay, while dealing with the grief of a possible friend-estrangement on the horizon, Frances ends up living with two male friends. On the other end, her desire to live her dream as a dancer grows increasingly out of reach as she lacks the money and opportunities to prosper. Frances gets by, and Gerwig gives a heartwarmingly honest performance that you can’t help but love, even when her actions are seemingly pathetic or stupid. The beauty of Frances’ perfectly flawed nature is that it’s relatable and reassuring, but Gerwig never makes her feel cliché or a one-dimensional embodiment of a “quirky” character.
She lays out Frances’ shamelessly ambitious and hopeful spirit marked by the darkness of uncertainty with an exuberance that is joyful to watch. As things get tough and Frances doesn’t know where she’s going to live, how she’s going to earn enough money, or the status of her friendship with Sophie, who eventually moves to Japan with her boyfriend, Patch, she still manages to dance through the stress and retain an optimistic spirit. In one particularly memorable scene, she runs, pirouettes and glides through the streets as David Bowie’s ‘Modern Love’ soundtracks the moment. The camera follows her movements as she twirls and dances, unbothered by the eyes of others on her.
Frances isn’t afraid to be a flawed individual, which makes her such a likeable character, and in various scenes we get some stunning dialogue that Gerwig delivers with such natural ease, and you can tell that these are words that the actor really resonates with, or at least has done in the past. “I’m so embarrassed. I’m not a real person yet,” she says in one scene, making no secret of the fact she is stumbling through making it work.
Her admiration of Sophie, treating her like one half of herself, is one of the film’s most strikingly real aspects, because the pain that Frances feels as the pair start to drift apart is something that stories onscreen have encapsulated so well. Drifting apart from someone who was once your main person, especially when they get into a relationship and find a new one to call their favourite, can be really challenging, and Gerwig’s exploration of this – messy, desperate, lonely, and empathetic – is incredibly insightful and raw.
Among the many standout moments, the highlight of Frances Ha is perhaps the monologue about an innate desire for closeness and understanding from another, whether romantic or platonic, which has resonated with many audiences. As Gerwig delivers this monologue, it feels like she’s pulling the words from deep within her: “It’s that thing when you’re with someone, and you love them and they know it, and they love you and you know it, but it’s a party… And you’re both talking to other people, and you’re laughing and shining, and you look across the room and catch each other’s eyes. But, but not because you’re possessive, or it’s precisely sexual, but because, that is your person in this life. And it’s funny and sad, but only because this life will end, and it’s this secret world that exists right there in public, unnoticed, that no one else knows about. It’s sort of like how they say that other dimensions exist all around us, but we don’t have the ability to perceive them. That’s—that’s what I want out of a relationship. Or just life, I guess,” she says.
This monologue truly captures the essence of the film, of Frances, of her relationship with Sophie and the world at large, and is also a teaching moment that we should not settle for anything less than this shared “secret world” with someone as life is too short to pretend and not deeply feel companionship.
Gerwig would make Lady Bird a few years later, which feels like a spiritual successor (or prequel) to Frances Ha, with themes of navigating a pivotal moment in life, dealing with strained friendships, the complexities of a mother-daughter relationship and location and belonging forming the narrative. Without Gerwig’s performance as Frances, it’s hard to imagine Lady Bird coming to fruition, and since then, she has become a major filmmaker, helming Barbie in 2023 to widespread acclaim.
In a way, it seems as though this heartwarming black and white feature was a turning point for her, whose embodiment of the charmingly naïve, hopeful, funny, and loving Frances demonstrated the actor’s deep understanding of the complexity of the human condition in all of its beauty, silliness and ugliness.
