Frances Ha follows a 27-year-old apprentice dancer in New York whose life refuses to assemble into the shape she expected: no steady job, no permanent address, an increasingly distant best friend.
Noah Baumbach directs from a script he co-wrote with Greta Gerwig, who also stars, and the two treat Frances's drift with comic patience rather than pity. It rewards viewers who like their comedies unresolved: just a string of small humiliations and small victories that add up to something closer to how twenties actually feel.
The film arrived on a three million dollar budget, premiered at Telluride and Toronto in 2012, then opened in limited US release through IFC Films in May 2013, the kind of quiet arthouse rollout that rarely holds a place in wider streaming conversation. It also sits between two more heavily marketed points in Greta Gerwig's career: her earlier mumblecore ensemble work and her later solo directing debut with Lady Bird, so it tends to get treated as a stepping stone rather than a destination in its own right.
The most deliberate choice is the black-and-white cinematography by Sam Levy, which Baumbach has said was meant to strip the film to its barest bones and manufacture an instant, borrowed nostalgia. The look and the editing rhythm come straight from the French New Wave, recalling Truffaut, with specific moments quoting the tradition outright, including a mock fight that echoes Jules and Jim. The effect is a present-day story about a broke, drifting twenty-something filmed with the formal confidence of a much older cinema.
The Criterion Collection later added it to its library, an unusual endorsement for a film this small and this recent. For a first watch, that combination, a movie built on hangouts and apartment moves carrying that much archival weight, is reason enough to put it on tonight.
