Review: Frances Ha – Monday 9th June

It’s the mark of a good film, when it’s so simple you can sum it up in a sentence, and so deep you’re still digging into it hours, even days after the credits roll. That’s Frances Ha.
Frances , played by Greta Gerwig, is a 27-year-old New Yorker trying to figure out her place in the world.: She has a roommate, Sophie (played by Sting’s daughter Mickey Sumner), with whom she lives “like a lesbian couple that doesn’t have sex.” She breaks up with her boyfriend (Michael Esper) because she doesn’t want to break her apartment lease with Sophie.
Sophie then decides to get a new roommate herself, leaving Frances to flail about for a place to crash, even as her job – as a backup dancer in a struggling troupe – threatens to similarly unravel. France’s problems are, in the grand scheme of things, pretty minor. Her new roommates, who seem effortlessly poised several rungs above her on the economic ladder, point out that she’s not truly poor. “You’d feel poor if you had as little money as I do,” she replies.
Frances is a fantastically complicated creation. Nerdy, needy and eager to please, she speaks elliptically (and not always truthfully), combining iterations of what she wants and what she thinks others want to hear. When she books an ill-advised weekend trip to Paris, she spends half her time in the City of Light sleeping off the jet lag, and the rest trying to set up dinner with a friend, and trying not to sound too frantic about it..