‘Frances Ha’ is Everything You Hate About Millennials
…but that’s why it’s so good.
“Tell me the story of us,” Frances, the 27-year-old protagonist of Frances Ha, filmmaker Noah Baumbach’s beautiful black-and-white homage to French New Wave cinema/ode to the quarter life crisis, implores her best friend Sophie one night as they lie next to each other in bed, enmeshed in the telltale uncertainty of life post-college, pre-pretty much everything else.
Their story, we soon learn — both in its imagined grand future, which involves countless artistic accomplishments and “so many honorary degrees,” as well as in its transitory present, which involves a rotating roster of apartments and the disgruntled acceptance of ATM fees — is eminently relatable and will ring all too familiar to anyone who has struggled with acquiescing their adolescent dreams with their adult reality.
Which, to be clear, is pretty much the entirety of today’s twenty-something population. And that’s not conjecture; it’s statistics. See: a United States Census report released just this April, revealing the increased percentage of millennials living at home and earning less income than those their age did in 1975. See: A 2013 report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce and The Generations Initiative broken down by PBS NewsHour, showing that today’s average millennial does not achieve until the age of 30 the wage level, and its accompanying level of independence, which young workers in 1980 reached at the age of 26.
And then see: Frances, the effervescent if awkward wannabe dancer beautifully brought to life by actress Greta Gerwig, whose struggles to build a so-called grown-up life in New York City — and in the arts, of all professions — provides a plentitude of all-too-relatable millennial moments.
Here, we present four particularly perfect ones.
First: The Financials
“I’m so embarrassed, I’m not a real person yet,” Frances says when her debit card is declined at dinner and she is forced to run across town to find an ATM.
Everyone in Frances’ world is taking financial help from their parents in order to survive, except for her, it seems. At one point towards the end of the movie, we even hear Frances’ mother apologizing for that fact — and if you wanted to knock the phone out of her hand at that moment and scream “don’t apologize! Your daughter is 27; it’s not your job to support her anymore,” know that you are not alone. But that anger doesn’t stop the portrayal from being accurate. In millennial America, money struggles are ubiquitous, if relative — there is no use pretending for even a moment that even in her often self-inflicted precarious financial positions, Frances is anything but privileged — and parents helping adult children find their footing is the norm, not the exception.
Thus when Frances’ aforementioned best friend Sophie decides to move out of their shared apartment and into one on her “favorite street” in Tribeca which Frances simply cannot afford, we learn via a seemingly throwaway line delivered on the subway that in order to do so, Sophie will in fact be securing the broker’s fee from her parents. And when one of Frances’ rotating roster of subsequent roommates, Benji, “internet-acquir[es] three pairs of very rare Ray Bans,” we learn that he is able to do so because he “caved” and accepted money from his stepdad. Because “exactly — the only people who can afford to be artists in New York are rich,” Sophie sums up succinctly upon seeing Benji-the-aspiring-comedy-writer’s apartment, where Frances has temporarily taken up residence.
Second: The All-Consuming Friendships
The catalyst for Frances’ struggle to determine where, exactly, she fits in the world, is in many ways her fantastically realistic evolving relationship with her best friend Sophie. We first see them running through the streets holding hands, drunk peeing in subway stations, sharing cigarettes out the window of their Brooklyn apartment, sleeping (platonically) in the same bed so as not to sleep alone, in a perfect cinematic expression of the fierce, sometimes codependent bond that can inform female friendships in your early-twenties.
“We are like a lesbian couple that doesn’t have sex anymore” Frances says. “Don’t pick at your face,” Sophie responds, because, yes, they are that close. They are, as Frances is wont to say many times over, “the same person, but with different hair.”
Until, that is, we learn that said closeness is slightly skewed, with Frances depending upon it much more than Sophie, who is willing to leave their shared abode to shack up with another friend in her favorite neighborhood before ultimately moving to Japan with the financier boyfriend that Frances “wants to love,” but can’t. That we get to see how their relationship endures, despite this, is a true testimony to Baumbach and Gerwig’s spot-on understanding of how close friendships evolve as we age.
Third: The Clinging to the Recent Past
“I have trouble leaving places,” Frances says to her ballet company director as she lingers in a dressing room after a performance, before she is told she won’t be cast in the Christmas show she was counting on in order to pay rent. And so she puts all of her stuff (minus one chair that won’t fit) into storage and flies home to her parents in Sacramento. Because when in doubt, go home, oh ye of the boomerang generation (for the holidays, anyway). Surely it was better there.
Or, after an ill-advised, debt- and melancholy-inducing trip alone to Paris is followed up with the offer of an administrative versus creative job, go back to the college life you left behind a mere few years earlier. Surely you can figure things out back in the ole dorm room.
Four: The social media farce
It is there, working as a resident advisor on the campus of her alma mater, that Frances runs into a delightfully drunk Sophie at a fundraising event for the first time in a long time and learns that, despite all online appearances to the contrary, Sophie’s expat life isn’t exactly going perfectly.
“But your blog looks so happy,” Frances says in response to Sophie’s confession of hating Tokyo and wanting to return home. “I don’t think my mom would read it if it was about depression,” Sophie replies. “Mine would,” Frances deadpans.
For Frances and Sophie, as for everyone these days, technology is pervasive. (“I love you Sophie, even if you love your phone that has email more than you love me,” Frances says early in the film. “My phone that has email doesn’t leave a casserole dish in the sink for three days,” Sophie brilliantly responds.) But, even for those damn Snapchatting millennials, that doesn’t mean said technology is necessarily truthful: we all present a specifically curated version of ourselves online.
Don’t let the filters fool you like they momentarily did Frances.
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