An aspiring dancer (Greta Gerwig), 27 years old and still apprenticing, struggles with rent and relationships in the big city as she moves from apartment to apartment, but truly fears losing her best friend (Mickey Sumner) who starts becoming serious with her dope boyfriend (Patrick Heusinger) and out of the blue decides to relocate with him to Tokyo. Frances Ha is Noah Baumbach's return home to New York City (with detours to Sacramento, Poughkeepsie, and a very unexpected and melancholy trip to Paris) and also to the personal, knowing kind of filmmaking on display in his superlative The Squid and the Whale. Working digitally in beautiful black and white (which is reportedly very difficult to achieve), he aimed to capture the feeling of The French New Wave (two of Francois Truffaut's classics leapt to mind for for me, Jules and Jim for the quick paced litheness and even The 400 Blows during certain scenes of forlornness). Coauthoring the screenplay with Gerwig, they both create an original, absolutely lovely lead character which she, along with Sumner who carries the same zeal, performs with a kind of scatterbrained joy.
