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 The titular heroine of Frances Ha is 27, mostly adrift, clinging to sketchy, outdated dreams, and to an idea of friendship that seems set to expire any second.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. 

        

Taking up arms in the name of sandwich artistry. Oh, and freedom.

The opening faux-documentary news-babble montage of the new Red Dawn fires a flurry of accusations at North Korea, rendering Kim Jong-un as much of a nuke-stackin’ loose cannon as his pa. There goes that market! But seriously, if you’re ever in doubt about how bafflingly pointless studio remakes are conceived, rest assured that it is indeed all about markets. When this post-Cold War Red Dawn was actually shot back in 2009 the bad guys were the Chinese; once some PR whiz pointed out that the Chinese spend a lot of dough on American exports Red Dawn was rejiggered so that the Asian invaders originated from a much smaller communist republic, one where the only way anyone’s likely to see this remake is via samizdat DVDs. No doubt it will be regarded as a comedy.

Which is a generous way of categorizing this slab of hoorah, arriving in theatres just in time to function as a balm for disappointed Republicans. The original Red Dawn (1984), co-written and directed by John Milius, his rep still aglow from Apocalypse Now (1979) and Conan the Barbarian (1979), was not exactly a good movie. Okay, it’s ludicrous. But it retains a certain awesome power as a wet dream for the National Rifle Association and time capsule of Regan-era Hollywood. It also scared the shit out of me as a little kid, those first images of jellyfish-like Russian parachutes descending upon the field outside the windows of a high school, and the teacher getting plugged in the guts. Milius may be a right wing propagandist (or not; I’m not so presumptuous as to understand his politics), but he’s also a real filmmaker. His Red Dawn captured something in the mid-80s air, tapped into genuine fears, and allowed a lot of kids fantasize about ditching school, taking up arms, going camping forever, and popping out of hidden pits to kill commies in the name of freedom. “Wolverines!”

Directed by stunt coordinator Dan Bradley and written by Jeremy Passmore and Carl Ellsworth—a go-to guy for remakes, Ellsworth’s already got Disturbia (2007) and The Last House on the Left (2009) under his belt—it’s rather difficult to see how this new Red Dawn speaks either to our times or to our subconscious desire to go guerilla. The performances are more sober than those of Swayze, Sheen, et al, but they’re also way less fun and lack silly hats. The new characters have certain advantages over the originals, such as actual military training, but they seem less emblematic of Milius’ irony-free vision of grass roots survivalist gender-equalizing machismo—these new brothers don’t actually drink the blood of the animals they kill.

“We inherited out freedom,” says one of these new, wearisome Wolverines. “Now it’s up to us to fight for it!” A recruiting slogan if ever there was one, but what flags of freedom are flying in Red Dawn? Look no farther than the best scene in the movie: a pair of hungry Wolverines hide out in an occupied Subway; “Sandwich artist, fill this bag with subs!” one of them demands (an excellent line); they take the bag of fixins back to their fellow vigilantes, who feed on the footlongs in querterbackian ecstasy. This is what American freedom tastes like: Wonderbuns, under-ripe tomatoes and lunchmeat. And you, foolish foreign intruder, will pry them from our cold, dying hands. 

     

Shackled to destiny

Relentless, witty and ribald, with a locomotive plot so busy that I never remember all its stops no matter how many times I see it, Alfred Hitchock’s The 39 Steps (1935) opens, aptly enough, at a London music hall, where the audience is so rowdy that a fight breaks out for no apparent reason during a performance by Mr. Memory (Wylie Watson), a precursor to the doomed protagonist in Borges’ great story ‘Funes, the Memorious,’ who strikes a triumphant bowling pose every time he answers a question from the crowd and follows it with “Am I right, sir?” In the audience sits one Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), a Canadian, supposedly, with a smart moustache, and our hero, one of Hitchcock’s “wrong men.” In the hubbub following the brawl he befriends a mysterious woman with a funny accent, a spy, it turns out, who, wasting no time, asks if she can come back to his place. “It’s your funeral,” he says, and he ain’t kidding. All she wanted was some food and a map of Scotland, but she winds up dead with a knife in the back. What’s going on? Who knows? Not Hannay, but he’d better find out since the guys who killed his guest want him dead and all of Great Britain figures him for a murderer. So he gets on a train bound for the hauntingly photographed Highlands, a train he’ll have to jump off of, but not before having his first run-in with an elegant and opinionated blonde named Pamela (Madeline Carroll). She rats him out, but in Hitchcock’s universe ratting can be the first rung on the ladder to romance.

The Spanish word for handcuffs is esposas, which is also the word for spouses. Which provides another layer of foreshadowing to the key moment in 39 Steps when a not very smart cop decides to handcuff Hannay to Pamela (one of many opportunities for Hitch to focus his camera on hands). Marriage is generally maligned in The 39 Steps (Hannay convinces a milkman to help him elide some nasty spies only by telling the milkman that he’s an adulterer), but through the unintended courtship of Hannay and Pamela, which involves deception and trust, resourcefulness and mutual respect—not to mention a delicious scene in which Pamela tries to remove her stockings and eat a sandwich at the same time—it becomes something to celebrate, something hard-earned and requiring of an adventurous spirit.

Criterion has released The 39 Steps in a new, beautifully transferred blu-ray edition, stuffed with supplements, including another solid audio commentary from Hitchcock scholar Marian Keane. It’s one of the great entertainments of its era, of any era, actually, and, especially when it looks this good, rewards repeat viewings.