Sunday, December 15, 2013

Frances Ha ..

A confession before I begin to talk about the movie - I watched it for Greta Gerwig.  I fell for her completely when I saw her in the mumblecore flick "Nights and Weekends" and I have been secretly in love since then. (And I mean it in a totally harmless non-stalker way). Well she plays Frances and has also co-written the screenplay. (+1)
  
Now the movie - beautifully shot in grainy monochrome, it is an unadorned story of Frances - a girl trying to make it in New York. In a world which has a very clear definition of having-made-it she is an oddball - a perennial underachiever and a fierce dreamer who refuses to give in to the onslaught of reality. She wants to be a dancer in a prestigious dance company where she works as an apprentice. We can see she is not that good. She shares an apartment with her best friend from college who is trying to drift away and she is almost always broke. But then despite it all she somehow manages to stay afloat and keep the darkness at bay with a genuine lightness of being. By the time it ends, we know it's a grim world we live in but there is hope within. So infectious is her goofy charm that we feel for her as she goes through her sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes embarrassing and always relatable life. Not all of us live our lives like this. I wished I did.

I finished this movie a few hours ago but thoughts kept swarming about in my head and I couldn't sleep. Also this song played on loop all this while:





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