Could it be that the mainspring of the behavior of our delightful twenty-something protagonist, Frances Ha, is a kind of innocuous solipsism? The walled-in world of her self-esteem, her occasional self-amusement suggesting that she’s getting along in the world despite its harshness and cruel indifference, her ability to dance down the street with a lithely flying, pirouetting body in those rich and vibrant tracking shots on the avenues of New York City without the slightest touch of self-conscious posturing—this all constitutes something like a life with fire and substance, and also a character whose independence is offset by bouts of social awkwardness, apathy, and indecision.
And so this titular character is a mixed bag. The real problem with Frances Ha is that she gives off an attitude that is equal parts complacency, apathy, awkwardness, and a certain endearing self-awareness, as though she were accepting the condition that life is humoring her and letting her get along without conceding her too much. Instead of the arrested development or mid-life doubts that its director, Noah Baumbach, often foists on his down-and-out and self-questioning characters, the salient feature of Frances Ha is that its protagonist is not doubtful but complacent, self-satisfied, and mediocre.
But I don’t think that Frances Halladay is mediocre—she has a buried lucidity that is undeniable, and the consistency of her approach to all her social interactions is almost stubbornly sincere. And yet in the concluding sequence of Frances Ha these things don’t amount to much. The general impression given off by Frances—either owing to the flaws of her character as depicted by the movie, or to the second-half structure of aimless, apathetic wandering to Paris and back—is that of a slow and innocuous subsiding, like a sailboat letting off a few final, death-rattling gurgles as it sinks into the depths.
This isn’t the end of Frances Ha—we can be sure of that. She’s still a young and apparently vibrant twenty-something, after all, even though the inevitable conclusion here is that I don’t care.
