Frances Ha
Director: Noah Baumbach
Year Released: 2012
Rating: 2.0
Ditzy, "undateable" dancer Frances (Greta Gerwig) works sometimes, lounges on couches other times, decides to take a flight to Paris (for the heck of it), comes back, returns to her old college in upstate New York: all this, apparently, in an effort to avoid the inevitable call to maturity. Baumbach, who made this same movie close to a quarter of a century ago in (the very funny) Kicking and Screaming, is essentially rehashing himself, albeit quite unsuccessfully (by dropping a lot of the snarky humor and memorable dialogue in this effort). I don't believe Gerwig's character is supposed to be completely sympathetic, but the movie is clearly asking you to identify with her in some fundamental way, which is difficult to do - she's done this "gee duh" bit far too often for it to pay dividends, and her character's level of privileged self-absorption is off-the-charts.
