Film Carew

Like a chin-strokin' essay-movie finding form by being told in chapters, Frances Ha is told in locations. Noah Baumbach's ambling collaboration with squeeze Greta Gerwig is a scrapbook - or, indeed, timeline - of collected vignettes, a vaguely-plotted mosaic of the trials, tribulations, and minor humiliations of its titular heroine, whose late-20s malaise finds her fumbling through various unsatisfying iterations of employment, relationship, and real estate. Giving structure to this all are inter-titles announcing the address of Gerwig's latest place-of-residence: various apartments in Brooklyn and Chinatown, and, from there, all manner of other locations. The symbolism of each change-of-address is plain to see: Frances is always moving, but never really going anywhere. Her restlessness comes in the absence of an obvious path forward; with her nervous energy, constant unsurety, and persistent self-doubt, our heroine is endlessly spinning her wheels; Frances Ha about how it feels to be living without traction.

After the more elaborate Margot And The Wedding and Greenberg - not to mention his long and ultimately failed attempt to adapt Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections as a series for HBO - here Baumbach wanted to work cheap and quick and loosely; to make a film that felt like a debut. Suitably enough, there's plentiful echoes of his actual debut, 1995's Kicking In Screaming; a tale of recent collegiate graduates caught in the netherworld between school - all that they've known - and the unknowable future of 'adulthood', whatever that means. And these echoes also mean there's ricocheting echoes Lena Dunham's debut feature, Tiny Furniture (which was heavily, admittedly in debt to Kicking And Screaming), and her popular television series Girls (also about 20-something dames struggling to pay bills in New York; and with bizarro beefcake Adam Driver strutting shirtless through both), but, wait, more on that show later.

Baumbach's sixth feature is a film about that feeling where everyone else has their shit more together than you, a fairly universal conceit that'll strike a chord with anyone's who's lagged behind upwardly mobile homies, spent years single, or held tight to 'creative' dreams. “I'm not a real person yet,” Gerwig bemoans, and the line is funny, but it hangs there too; lingering with that feeling that the life you're living isn't the one you've dreamt of, or what the world demands of you. The narrative directionlessness of Frances Ha may've been inspired by the nouvelle vague - by films made in improvisatory, often haphazard fashion; and, yes, hence the black-and-white, hence the chronological shooting, hence the foregrounding of pop-songs - but it serves a thematic metier; matching the life of its protagonist. At first, you wonder if Gerwig isn't just being introduced as another rom-com lead: her early financial peril and relationship disaster scanning as an artful riff on the humiliations that are imposed upon female leads (audiences always demanding this 'bringing down' of women, yet rarely of men). She's clumsy and awkward, she can't account for her bruises, and her life is a mess. “I'm trying to make a frittata, but it's really more of a scramble,” laments Frances, on both life and hung-over brunch.

Normally, this malaise would be the preamble to one thing: the arrival of the love-interest; but Baumbach and Gerwig's complete resistance to submit to such a standard is both honourable and delightful. In a film that constantly defies expectations of where you expect it to go - whimsically alighting to Sacramento or Paris or upstate New York; pirouetting between moments of crystalline surety and fogs of confusion - nothing is more unexpected than the fact that there's no leading man, no fucking, no kissing. This is where the Girls comparison seems embarrassing: like, the second series of that show literally found two women being rescued from mental illness by their ex-boyfriends, including one being carried. Here, no one's going to rescue Frances: not a man, not her parents, and not her best friend, Sophie (played, tartly, by newcomer Mickey Sumner), with whom she has a slightly-obsessive and definitely passive-aggressive relationship, that begins to drift apart when Sophie finds a boyfriend. The lesson, essentially, is that no one else is going to get your shit together for you; and that dreaming of a romantic rescue is but pining for a panacea. Life is hard and sad and unfair, and sometimes getting your shit together means letting go of the romantic fantasy of yourself that you've authored, and waking up to the reality in front of you.

Bringing this all to life is Gerwig, who after a career of impressive turns - from mumblecore 'it' girl in Hannah Takes The Stairs to serving as Whit Stillman's muse in his comeback flick Damsels In Distress - feels like an actor in the middle of a breakout performance. Her character is obviously closely related to her - she compares it to Buster Keaton the human and Buster Keaton the character; though Keaton never cast his own parents, as Gerwig does here - and, thus, she loads up on the things that she can convey innately: stumbling like a spaniel, all modern-dance limbs and loveable goofiness; her awkwardness both charming and grating; her toddler's enthusiasm and emotional illiteracy butting up against social anxiety and a penchant for self-destructive drunkenness. It's a wonderfully flawed, complex character who, aside from her independence, defies another rom-com trend: that a lead should be 'likeable'. Gerwig is never that; only loveable and frustrating in equal amounts. Baumbach, behind the camera, looks on lovingly, lensing his very own über-babe with a reverence that harkens back to the nouvelle vague; to cinema's Godardian history of boys photographing girls. The 40-something auteur male-gazin' away at his 20-something love-interest may scan as ingenuey, but only up until you see the film; and witness the heart and truth and defiance Gerwig has etched into both script and performance.

In 2005, a 23-year-old Romanian woman, visiting a friend at a remote Moldovian abbey, heard the voice of the devil, and was, in response, treated to an 'exorcism': tied up and gagged and left in the hands of God. She died three days later of dehydration. These are the real-life facts - a story that stirred up a media storm in Romania - behind Cristian Mungiu's Beyond The Hills. In worse hands, this based-on-a-true-story story would've begat cinema hysterical; or, worse, hewing towards genre. Instead, Mungiu displays the same taut formalism, long-take realism, suffocating atmospherics, and ability to make narrative into parable that he did with 2007's 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, a portrait of a black-market abortion behind the Iron Curtain that stands as one of the very best films of this century. His follow-up doesn't measure up to that masterpiece, but it's still masterful. A tale of contemporary Romania that feels like it takes place in the middle ages, Beyond The Hills is a critique of the rise of Orthodox religion in the post-communist vacuum; a calm, cold, rational indictment of a nascent statewide embrace of irrational old-world superstition.