FRANCES HA Review

Frances Ha is all about growing up and in every sense of that phrase I feel like I can relate to what is taking place in this film. Given, I don’t live in New York and am not currently struggling to pay rent I can still understand coming to the point where the present is being forced to become more like the past and the aspirations you’ve had since childhood are approaching do or die time. It is a scary period in life where you truly believe you are determining what the rest of your life will be like and sometimes the prospects of that aren’t exactly on the positive side of things. Whether or not this turns out to be true or not is both unknowable to myself and Frances and the film does a fine job of conveying her anxiousness in not knowing where she will end up. She is yearning to know that her reality will meet her goals, but the constant fear of that not happening looms over her day to day life. It is something that is only escalated by the apparent ease with which all of her friends are dealing with this process. This also leads to the film unearthing something more than these typical issues of trying to find one’s self and carve out a place in the world, but also a layer of having to deal with relationships and the growth of friendship even if that means you are growing apart. The film deals specifically with that kind of relationship between girlfriends who view one another as family and that point in time where they have to essentially break up from constantly hanging out with one another and find themselves in relationships with guys that might eventually produce their own families. When one friend begins to make this transition and the other doesn’t it creates an awkward situation for the latter friend to fall into. That is where we find Greta Gerwig’s Frances as the film eases us into her life and gives us a lovely and quirky little slice of life that is just as charming and authentic as the titular character.