Frances' frustrating and directionless life choices are mirrored by the equally aimless course of the film. Not a horrible way to make a film. Stories don't need to have a clear path to be enjoyable. But when it makes an 86 minute long film feel like a 186 minute long mistake, I'm not sure I can, or would want to, jump on board with that. The meandering story-line could have been the worst part of the film. Surprisingly it was not.
Frances bounced between being charismatic to being super-duper unlikable in the blink of an eye. Greta Gerwig gave a quite convincing performance as the selfish and flawed Francis. Her character often went off on broken streams of consciousness. She seemed more to be talking to herself than the people around her throughout most of the film. That's probably not an altogether awful representation of more than a handful of the young folks of today, which was more frightening than impressive. Even with the often effective dialogue, it was difficult to care much about the characters at any given moment...except perhaps for the break-up scene between Frances & her boyfriend. It happens early in the story and it gives you a pretty good idea whether or not you will like or dislike Frances. I ended up only liking the boyfriend and he never showed up again. Yet somehow even that was not the most disappointing thing about the film.
So what was most objectionable, the most vile, the most atrocious part of the film? The answer is remarkably simple...It was filmed in black and white. Noah Baumbach made quite the pretentious and unnecessary choice to shoot Frances Ha this way. It can work for some films, but it really doesn't for this one. He may have intended to add some charm and whimsy to the film or possibly some depth, but for me it added an artificial, insincere quality to it. Plus the grungy black and white accentuated all the other deficiencies in the film. It's a shame...I liked his film The Squid and the Whale. And before seeing Francis Ha, I didn’t realize that one of the reasons for my liking Squid was because it was in color.
