Fleet, insightful, funny ha Ha

I remember 27, more meaningful than 21 or 30. I remember somehow knowing it would be transformative, even if I did little to actively transform myself. “27 is old,” as someone asserts in Frances Ha, but it’s young too. Certain peers stop excusing you for certain shortcomings, but few will write you off completely if you don’t get your shit together. 27 is suspension, wariness, looming threats of something called maturity, and persistent opportunities for parties to be prolonged. Everything I just wrote is wildly subjective, but it’s a subjectivity shared with the fleet, utterly unimposing yet cumulatively insightful new comedy directed by Noah Baumbach and written by Baumbach and the film’s star, Greta Gerwig. The titular heroine of Frances Ha is 27, mostly adrift, clinging to sketchy, outdated dreams, and to an idea of friendship that seems set to expire any second.

Frances and Sophie (Mickey Sumner) are best friends and roommates living in Brooklyn. They share nearly everything, including, most nights, a bed. They are “like a lesbian couple that doesn’t have sex anymore.” When in need of comfort, Frances asks Sophie to “tell me the story of us,” a ritual to maintain an adolescent fantasy image of the friends-as-power couple, conquering some corner of the world, Sophie’s being the publishing industry, Frances’ being the world of dance. About that: one of the elements I love about Frances Ha is how perfectly believable and preposterous it is that Frances wants to be a dancer. She can’t quite coordinate her body to do things like walk fluidly. She doesn’t look entirely comfortable, or grounded, while sitting in a chair or shadowing a guest at a party where she’s working as a server. In one scene she fumbles with a sandwich like she’s still learning to eat. Most of her movements seem involuntary: the way conversation with Sophie automatically prompts illustrative physical gestures even when they’re only speaking on the phone. Frances Ha is above all a character study, and Gerwig brings to just the right balance of self-effacing self-analysis and actor’s craft. Her character is adorable yet maddeningly passive. She’s makes you laugh, makes you crazy, breaks your heart if you’re in the unfortunate position of trying to be her boyfriend, or something. The film’s story, as such, is about Sophie moving in with her boyfriend and trying to grow up, and Frances missing Sophie wanting to follow her lead without having much of an idea as to how.

Baumbach has sculpted Frances Ha with a pretty irresistible sort of comic charisma. Much of the film is comprised of short, abrupt scenes, with hard cuts to sound and image, whose connections are not always obvious, just a line here, a gesture there, creating an inherently buoyant, clipped rhythm, as engagingly disjointed as Frances’ daily life. The photography is black and white, with a level of fuzziness that invokes present-tense nostalgia. Along with early Truffaut, Woody Allen is an obvious influence, not only in the silvery views of New York but in the patter, the urbane vernacular, the particular use of music over montage, and the title cards that state each address Frances inhabits, however briefly. Frances claims to have trouble leaving places, yet once her living situation with Sophie falls apart all she does is leave. She moves in with two dudes and their liquor trolley. She embarks on a Christmas visit to the folks in Sacramento, and takes an impulsive, poorly planned trip to Paris. For all her apparent inertia, Frances does indeed movie, perhaps most memorably in a sequence that finds her doing nothing more than skipping, dancing, scurrying down several Manhattan blocks to David Bowie’s ‘Modern Love.’ It’s a lovely scene of a young woman still capable of fleeing her own ample self-consciousness and giving in to the sheer propulsion of a given moment. Frances Ha is all about moments, this one and this one and this. And it has just enough of them to make us feel like we’ve really come to know some substantial, larger moment within a single life, a moment—27—that will surely transform the bearer of that life in a permanent, lasting way. 

        

Friends, Romans, country bumpkins

To Rome, With Love begins already in motion, the camera curving around a roundabout until it lands on a statue-like traffic cop who confesses that he speaks poor English but is nonetheless eager to introduce us to some of his fellow Romans and their stories. It’s a corny bookend device of the sort we’ve seen in Woody Allen’s films before, the sort of throwaway cliché he enjoys employing, hopefully in the service of something more adventurous and unexpected. And To Rome, With Love is adventurous, though, more to the point, after more than 40 years and I don’t know how many movies, this may be the most unapologetically, deliriously, busily, messily nonsensical Woody Allen comedy ever. It is also frequently very, very funny.

To make an anagram of the film’s titular city, the operative word in Rome is more: more characters, more stories, more goofiness. We got a middle-aged bureaucrat (Roberto Benigni) who wakes up one day to discover that he’s a celebrity. He’s attacked by paparazzi, is whisked off to a morning show where he describes his breakfast, is given an office of his own and a giraffe in a tight dress who’s job detail involves “attending to his needs all day long.” We got an unhappily retired novelty opera director (Allen, in his increasingly ridiculous looking oversized chinos) and his psychiatrist wife (Judy Davis) who’ve come to Rome to visit their daughter (Alison Pill) and the family she’s about to marry into, a family whose patriarch is a mortician who sings like Caruso, at least in the shower. But how is Woody going to get him to realize he’s a star waiting to be exploited, I mean, discovered? (I can never tell if Woody gives himself the best lines or simply delivers them better than everybody else. While discussing his proletariat-championing son-in-law-to-be, he quips, “I was Left when I was his age too, but I wasn’t a communist. I couldn’t even share a bathroom.”

We got a couple of newlywed country bumpkins in the big city for the first time. She gets lost in the streets—for days! He’s unexpectedly visited by a prostitute (Penelope Cruz)! His wealthy Roman relatives walk in to his hotel room just as he and the prostitute and entangled on the bed, and in a moment of panic he pretends she’s his wife. The false couple are taken on a private tour of the Vatican and to a garden party brimming with Rome’s bigwigs of business—most of whom are Cruz’s clients. (A hooker who gets to hobnob with society: Davis isn’t the only thing resurrected from Deconstructing Harry.)

We got a young American architectural student (Jesse Eisenberg) enjoying a pleasant life abroad with his girlfriend (Greta Gerwig) until the girlfriend’s beguiling actress friend (Ellen Page, excellent as the fille fatale) comes to visit. “There’s something attractive about a man who’s sensitive to the agonies of existence,” she explains en route to a torrid affair with the hapless Eisenberg, who meanwhile receives romantic advice from an elder version of himself (Alec Baldwin, his brooding deadpan perfect for the film’s most absurd character). Baldwin’s introduced as an apparently normal guy, ie: not a phantom, returning the city where he spent his 20s, yet soon he meets Eisenberg and winds up tagging along on the kid’s adventures. Sometimes only Eisenberg can see and hear Baldwin; sometimes others can see and hear him. It’s totally inconsistent, ridiculous, and one of the best parts of the movie.

What’s it all about? Thrills are fleeting, fame is fickle, nostalgia is inherently false, romance is illusory. The usual Woody themes, but delivered with brio by a wonderful cast. Leave the monster truck rally superhero blockbusters to somebody else; this is my idea of silly summer fun.

  

Cultivation theory

The titular damsels of writer/director Whit Stillman’s new movie, his first in 14 years, are in each pretty, preppy, poised and alert to the world in their highly selective way. Each are named after flowers, each are odour-sensitive, each strives to use their ostensibly superior ethical, intellectual and interactive skills to fortify the quality of student life at Seven Oaks College. Their tactics include suicide prevention through tap-dancing (the handmade poster on wall of the suicide prevention center reads COME ON, IT’S NOT THAT BAD!) and going out with boys who are neither handsome, nor charming, nor smart. (One of them is so dumb he doesn’t even know his colours.) By rewarding the male doofi (that’s plural for doofus) of Seven Oaks with their companionship, these damsels feel they can usher these doofi from the life of aimless idiocy to which they seem surely destined to a more enlightened and socially meaningful place. Of course, dating doofi also prevents the damsels from experiencing such annoying unpleasantries as heartbreak.

Herein lays the very special comic tone that Stillman aspires to and frequently apprehends in Damsels in Distress: whether or not his characters are actually from privilege they each work arduously to cultivate both the airs and the sense of altruistic vocation they associate with privilege, and such airs and ambitions constitute both the damsels’ folly and their persistent charisma. Most are well-intentioned emotional cowards, but Stillman knows that there’s more to be gained from sympathizing with them and their quixotic pretentions than looking down his nose at them. You might have hated these damsels from a distance when you went to school with them, but viewed through Stillman’s generous, stylized, idiosyncratic gaze, they become people you want to spend more time with.

Perhaps idiosyncratic is putting things too mildly. The movie’s chief damsel, Violet, is always, even in casual conversation, speaking lines like, “Must we tether ourselves from comment because we ourselves are human too?” She sounds out each word carefully, ensures that each sentence is complete, and doing so bears little resemblance to the sorts of characters found in virtually any contemporary American youth comedy. Fortunately she’s played by Greta Gerwig, the actress (and occasional writer and director) probably most closely associated with such (if you’ll excuse my use of this very stupid genre title) “mumblecore” movies as Hannah Takes the Stairs, Baghead and House of the Devil. Gerwig’s definitely not mumbling here. In fact, I’d go so far as to suggest that in Gerwig Stillman’s found his ideal actor, one who intuits the cadences of his anachronistic comic style and embodies the delicate imbalance of his quirky, sometimes fabulous character conceits.

Which isn’t to say that everything in Damsels flies. The meandering quality of the narrative eventually catches up with itself, and a closing musical sequence is neither awkward enough nor elegant enough to keep from falling flat. But it does have the funniest suicide attempt I think I’ve seen in a movie, its use of motel-issue soap as an agent of soul-healing is hilariously absurd, and, more importantly, its central characters are never given anything less than a slew of contradictions, conflicting desires and other compelling complications. They are, to be sure, comic constructs, but they also resonate with lived experience, which is what good comedy is all about.