We are all familiar with the classic chick flick. Movies that are usually made for female audiences in the past usually have had a similar plot line: they follow a quirky and charming young woman who meets an equally charming young man and they perform a sequence of charming and sometimes comedic experiences together until things eventually turn out magically perfect. This kind of movie can be fun to watch, they are classic examples of a “feel-good” film. Nonetheless they are often and relatively one dimensional in character complexity and development, especially on the female side. There is usually an underlying understanding that the woman’s meaning is built in conjunction with the man’s. In other words the woman’s existence and the way her existence is perceived is somewhat dependent on the man in a lot of these movies. But now there are a crop of movies being made with a female audience in mind that have become more intellectual and in some cases realistic, something closer to the way women exist in the real world. This new perspective in more modern “women’s films” takes on the underlying belief in delineating one’s own existence (especially that of female protagonists) through trial and error, through personal agency and experience rather than a premeditated set of parameters which in general terms is a building block of the philosophical belief system of existentialism. Frances Ha (2012) directed by Noah Baumbach updates the classic “chick flick” form with an intervening discourse on feminist existentialism through the protagonist’s consistent failures, complexity of character, and lack of centered love interest.
In The New Woman’s Film: Femme-Centric Movies for Smart Chicks a book by Hilary Radner, she dissects Frances Ha as a case study and writes about the way the cowriting of Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig played a part in the progressive lens through which the movie takes place. Radner wrote that “Frances Ha has a double origin (Baumbach and Gerwig) in which two autobiographies are intertwined and displaced” (134). She elaborates in explaining how Baumbach’s older male perspective combined with Gerwig’s fresh female perspective made for a tonally unique and in a way more realistic, true to existence, film. Part of this is the way Frances Ha brings a sense of intellect and portrayal of actual human existence through what many might consider failures of the protagonist’s life. As a lot of previous films for women were often made to show the female characters sans mistakes or at least without unlikeable traits. However, in Frances Ha, unlikability traits and failures on the protagonist’s (Frances’s) part are what makes her her. Her realness, her mistakes, failures and unlikeability is actually what makes her likable because she does it all with a certain presence, a certain lightness. The way Frances fails with an attitude that is often excited resembles the existentialist idea of defining one’s own existence just by doing. Frances fails to progress at her company of employment, her relationship fails, she looks in the mirror too much, her best friend leaves their shared apartment to move in with someone else. All moments of a kind of failure that real people experience constantly but are rarely acknowledged in commercial media. And yet Frances goes through these setbacks while somehow moving forward at the same time. She has an air of certainty within her chaos that is relatively revolutionary for female protagonists.
Also, unlike most films aimed at a primarily female audience before the 1990s, there is no centered love interest in Frances Ha. Frances herself is the center of the movie and all of her relationships come into the storyline but she remains the focal point. In Margaret Simons’ 1998 book Beauvoir and the Second Sex: Feminism, Race and the origins of Existentialism she says that “motherhood is very often experienced as a fact of life over which we have little control” (70). The implied idea that companionship and reproduction is the inevitable and desirable future outcome for any and all female protagonists is rejected in the film similarly to the way Simone Beauvoir rejected with feminist existentialism. Beauvoir instead defined the feminine being to have capacity to choose her purpose and meaning of existence separate from a predefined set of expectations (romantic male companionship, motherhood, caretaking, etc). Similarly, our protagonist embodies a more youthful and exploratory behavior, defining the choices she makes in her life as the outcomes constantly change. The one long term companion Frances does have in the movie is her best friend Sophie. And that relationship in itself ungulates in its closeness. There is a scene in the movie when Frances describes what she has always wanted in a partner but never felt like she had. She says that “it’s that thing when you’re with someone, and you love them and they know it, and they love you and you know it… but it’s a party… and you’re both talking to other people… and you look across the room and catch each other’s eyes… and it’s this secret world that exists right there in public, unnoticed, that no one else knows about.” In the final moments of the movie she finally gets that moment. But she gets it with Sophie. They are at an event and they look across the room at each other and the audience knows that this moment described earlier by Frances is taking place. In the literary journal Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism James Zborowski wrote an essay called “Passing Time in Frances Ha” thinking about the movie as a case study for the way cinematography relates to time and portrayal of relationships. In it he says that in this scene “Frances, after having spent the rest of the film either lamenting the loss of or trying to cling onto or recreate her relationship with Sophie, making her peace with the new (and much-diminished) degree of intimacy she can now expect from that relationship” (49). The fact that this kind of satisfaction for Frances takes place in this way with an acceptance of change within this platonic feminine relationship is borderline revolutionary. It breaks the formula of a movie’s satisfactory resolution being the everlasting love of the woman and man. It instead reframes this woman’s existence with a purpose that she has created the conditions for and accepts the transitory nature of.
Some might say that Frances Ha is still too simplistic of a representation of femininity, that maybe her awkwardness and jubilant demeanor is just another way of oversimplifying a female character. A lot of her actions seem kind of juvenile and at times idealistic or naive. Though it is true that Frances is presented as a slightly goofy person, her eccentric characteristics don’t take away from the reliability or sense of realness in her character. The movie is a balance of eccentricity and silliness punctuated by its realist ideas. Moreover, Frances Ha is a movie and therefore some level of simplicity is important for the movie to be watchable and understandable. It is somewhat impossible for a representation of a character in a film with limited parameters to truly take on the level of complexity we know humans to have over their entire lifetime. The movie requires some level of fun and some level of simplicity in order for its potency to be deliverable rather than so detailed and layered that it’s confusing or unintelligible.
The film Frances Ha brings a new meaning to what are considered “films for women” by giving the protagonist unlikable traits and failing life trajectories, creating a fictional woman who is a real person that women can see themselves in. The movie incorporates a feminist existentialist perspective into the otherwise oversimplified female representation in a lot of movies made for female audiences. Frances creates the parameters of her own life and adapts as they constantly change. She refuses to align with any set of predestined circumstances and instead finds joy from connections and moments as they come. She is both an aspirational and deeply relatable symbol. She is an icon of feminist existentialism and above all a champion of living freely.
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