Tag: French New Wave

The Lifelike, Feminist Choreography of ‘Frances Ha’

Frances Ha movie poster.


Written by Leigh Kolb
Spoilers ahead!

“27 is old.”

Frances Ha is a love letter to that idea–that 27 is old, but is, at the same time, the beginning of everything. For this generation, 27 is at that cusp between youth and adulthood and it is painful, terrifying and full of misery and joy.

The film captures that moment perfectly, and its bare French New Wave style allows the story,  which focuses on, in the words of director Noah Baumbach, “That period in your 20s where you’re necessarily having to separate yourself from a kind of romantic idea of yourself,” to be on full display.

In addition to capturing that moment, Frances Ha also has at its center a friendship between two women. It easily passes the Bechdel Test, and was co-written by the actor Greta Gerwig, who plays Frances.

“I’m not messy, I’m busy.”

In an interview, Gerwig says that the film and its focus on evolving relationships and changing is about that “moment when you’re exiting your youth and you really only know it when it’s gone. It doesn’t announce that it’s the last day of youth, it just leaves…” While these kinds of stories are not rare, seeing the focus placed on a woman’s life and female friendship is.

Frances Ha is one of those rare films that makes a feminist’s heart grow three sizes in an hour and a half.

The female protagonist and her best friend, Sophie (Mickey Sumner), are engaged in the most important relationship on screen. Frances and her boyfriend at the beginning of the film break up (he wants to get cats and for her to move in with him; she wants to keep living with Sophie), and Sophie has a relationship with the kind of guy who wears a ball cap and says, “I have to take a leak,” but the central relationships are Frances and Sophie and Frances and herself.

Frances and Sophie’s friendship is incredibly realistic.

Frances is an aspiring modern dancer (she’s an understudy and teaches dance lessons to children at a dance company), and anyone with minimal knowledge of the dancing profession knows that 27 is likely far too old to have any hope of joining the company, yet Frances hopes. She’s sure that this is the year she will be chosen for the company and at least get to tour.

Sophie moves out to live with an acquaintance in Tribeca, where she’s always wanted to live. Frances haphazardly becomes a roommate to two “rich kid” young men (an artist, Lev, and a writer, Benji, with wealthy parents), and she doesn’t get asked to dance in the Christmas productions, much less be a part of the company. Frances’s life–which hasn’t yet felt like it’s begun–is unraveling.

Frances, Benji and Lev.

When she goes home for Christmas, she lies in a bathtub full of water as her mother pounds on the door: “Frances, how much longer?” she pleads.

The length of her life seems short and long, and the next step is elusive.

Through it all, Frances perseveres. She doesn’t break down, she doesn’t quit moving, even if her moves sometimes feel clunky–and real.

In what’s arguably her lowest moment, when she’s attending a dinner party with her temporary roommate who doesn’t seem to like her, Frances does break–in her own way. She drinks a bit too much and when she learns (from strangers) that Sophie is moving to Japan with her fiance, Frances decides to go to Paris.

Frances dances through the streets to David Bowie.

“Sometimes it’s good to do what you’re supposed to do when you’re supposed to do it,” she says. At this moment, she means going to Paris–even on a charge card–and having a worldly experience. It’s disappointing, as most of those experiences that we are “supposed” to have often are. Frances is left feeling empty, and more lost than when she began.

She makes sure to be home on Monday, because the head of the dance company had requested a meeting with her. Frances–charmingly delusional–thinks she’s going to ask her to be a member of the company. Instead, she’s offered an office administration job. Frances says no. She’s not ready to move into that part of her life, where she no longer has that unfettered hope of being who she thought she was going to be.

She returns to her alma mater to be an RA during a summer dance camp (where she discovers she’s not even allowed to take dance classes) and a server for special events. It’s during this experience–the juxtaposition of her life and the college students’ lives, and her being an adult in a place of youthful potential–that something changes. She runs in to a drunk Sophie at a fundraiser. Sophie is belligerent and stays over in Frances’s dorm room. Their roles are reversed that night. Frances seems to have it all together and Sophie is falling apart.

“Your blog looked so happy,” Frances says after Sophie says she’s been miserable and won’t be marrying her fiance. They both had been struggling to do what they are supposed to do when they are supposed to do it, but it’s not working. They must separate themselves from that “romantic idea” they’d had of themselves, their “story of us” that included taking over the world, to move forward.

Frances does so by taking the administrative job at the dance company, and is able to continue choreographing. Her eyes glisten with happiness in the control booth as dancers on stage perform her choreography. As the gorgeous, disjointed dance goes on, the camera pans through the audience, focusing on all of the people in Frances’s life who care about and support her. The company owner compliments her work, gushing over the performance. Frances briefly talks to one of her old roommates, Benji, and it is clear that something might develop between the two of them. But the person she’s “making eyes” at is Sophie, her best friend.

The framing of Frances’s life around a dance career is perfect, because dance is a profession that one ages out of, and it’s so much, on the surface, about performance. Frances, as she perceives herself getting older, feels like she needs to perform to choreography not her own. When she realizes she can make her life work in another way, she’s rewarded.

In an article at Forbes, Dina Gachman notes the importance of Frances’s career trajectory, and the lesson that there’s something in between getting exactly what you think you want or settling for less:

“That doesn’t mean you should meander all over the place without a plan waiting for success to rain down on you, but one of the great things about Frances Ha is that it’s saying: It’s OK that your life and career aren’t picture perfect. Maybe the picture is just different than you imagined.”

In the end, Frances is moving into her own apartment, a sign of success, since her living arrangements have always been cause for stress and uncertainty. She’s able to work and make a living in the dance world. She’s everything she wanted to be, just in a different way.

Frances dancing in a grown-up pencil skirt.

As she goes to put her handwritten name plate onto her mailbox, her name is too long to fit. She folds it neatly, and “Frances Ha” peeks out from the window. She did what she needed to do to make it fit, much like she did with her life. When she does figure out how to make all of the pieces fit, she gets everything she needs and realizes what she wants.

In “Why Frances Ha is the Must-See Feminist Film of the Year,” Imran Siddiquee says,

“While capturing the hilarity, awkwardness and anxiety all of us might face in our late 20s – gaining and losing best friends while pursuing what feels like an increasingly impossible dream – Frances Ha says something very specific about gender. It shows us that women can be messy, graceful, sad, funny, artistic, ambitious and caring all at once. You know, human.”

The sheer humanity on display throughout Frances Ha feels much more groundbreaking than it should.  The women and men in the film are not people you aspire to be, but they are people, on some level, who you are and who you know.

After watching the film, I immediately told my best friend she had to watch it. The depiction of female friendship and the muddy misery of the mid-20s was breathtaking. There are so many art-house and Hollywood films that center on men’s coming-of-age stories, and so few about women’s. Frances Ha shows that it can be done, and it can be done well.

That moment when you are in the control booth of your life, which may not look how you thought it would, but it’s just how it’s supposed to be? That’s a great moment.

When a flawed and wonderful woman is having that moment on the big screen? That’s a great moment for all of us.

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. 

Foreign Film Week: Remembering, Forgetting and Breaking Through in the Female Narrative of ‘Hiroshima mon amour’



Written by Leigh Kolb


Hiroshima mon amour debuted in 1959, 14 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed. Alain Resnais’ first feature film explores memory, forgetting and tragedy on an individual and worldwide scale, largely through the lens of Elle (“Her”), played by Emmanuelle Riva.

While Resnais had signed on to do a documentary about the atomic bomb, he concluded that it should be fictional and “that the impact of Hiroshima would be refracted through the viewpoint of a foreign woman,” according to critic Kent Jones. Resnais wanted Marguerite Duras, a French writer and later film director, to write the screenplay. 
Duras’ command of literature, dialogue and feminist sensibilities resonate in the film (Duras was nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay). Hiroshima mon amour, which grounds itself in the brief affair of a French woman and a Japanese man (Lui, “Him,” played by Eiji Okada) in Hiroshima, is as much about the growth and healing of an individual in a partnership as it is about nations healing after the second World War. 
Marguerite Duras wrote the screenplay, a stream-of-consciousness conversation with a focus on the feminine.

This juxtaposition of the feminine (love, emotion, peace) and the masculine (war, possession, destruction) shows that neither exists in a vacuum. 

The first section of the film shows Elle and Lui’s naked bodies intertwined, and their dialogue–dominated by her thoughts–is accompanied by increasingly awful footage of the aftermath of the bomb. She talks about how she visited the museum in Hiroshima: “… the reconstructions, for lack of anything else… the explanations, for lack of anything else.” She looked at the photographs and the scorched metal. She says, “What else can a tourist do but weep? I’ve always wept over Hiroshima’s fate.” As she “remembers,” Lui interjects that she remembers nothing, that she knows nothing and that there was nothing for her to weep over.

Elle was a young woman in occupied France (Nevers) when she learned the bomb dropped. Lui was fighting in the war, and his family was in Hiroshima. As the narrative unfolds and Elle comes to terms with her past, her youth and madness that she had in Nevers was due to her intense love with a German soldier–the enemy–who was killed right before they were set to leave together.

Lui’s story doesn’t seem as important as hers. We know he’s married (they both are), and that he’s a successful architect and involved in politics. His role in the film is that of a lover, of course, a pursuer and a listener. 

Elle, fighting Lui’s claims that she doesn’t know anything about Hiroshima, stresses that she does know. She says she knew that women risked giving birth to “monsters,” men risked becoming sterile, huge amounts of food had to be thrown away and that the “principle of inequality” kept advancing–between races and classes. He tells her she knows nothing, but we hear her concern with the traditionally feminine, even feminist, cultural and human ramifications of this new warfare. 

Her memory and knowledge, from a French perspective, also symbolizes the difficulties that others have in attempting to remember and to understand tragedies on foreign soil. 

When this introductory collage of words and images ends, the couple’s faces are shown, laughing in bed. They are individuals now, not just ideas. 

He asks, “What did Hiroshima mean to you in France?” 

She answers, “The end of war. I mean, completely.” She couldn’t believe they did it and that they succeeded. 

“The whole world rejoiced, and you rejoiced with it,” he says. 

Elle and Lui share passion and memory.

Their conversations, although heavy, are rooted in a desire and growing love for one another. The beginning conversation sounds uncomfortable since Lui is denying Elle’s memory and understanding, but they weave themselves together and her memories become lucid as the story unfolds. And Lui listens and falls deeper in love with her.

This prevailing theme of memory and understanding, and the limitations of both, are a product of a unique film production–Japanese and French companies and crews produced it, and the producers demanded that one star be French and the other Japanese. Even the production of the film highlights this partnership and what can be possible when cultures partner. Resnais and Duras, the creative team, show the great power of giving creative license to both the masculine and feminine.  
Elle is in Hiroshima acting in a film about “peace,” and when Lui finds her on set, they are filming actors protesting with signs about nuclear testing and photos from after Hiroshima. Much like the setting of Hiroshima itself, these scenes provide a backdrop to the individual love affair of a couple while reminding the audience of worldwide pain and tragedy.
Elle describes her memory of her past in Nevers (after Lui asks her about it). When she first asks why he asked about Nevers, Lui says he understands that she “was young, and didn’t belong to anyone in particular. I somehow understand that you began to be who you are today.”

She fell in love with a German soldier, and he was killed. She stayed by his cold body while the cathedral bells celebrated the liberation of Nevers (again, showing the complex perspectives of victory for some and tragedy for others). Her family is shunned since she was a “disgrace,” and her head is shaved. When she screams, she’s locked in the cellar until she becomes “reasonable,” and her mother sends her to Paris.

When she arrives in Paris, Hiroshima is “in all the papers.” She says, “Fourteen years have passed–I still remember the pain a little bit, but one day  I will no longer remember it. At all. Nothing.”

Lui asks if her husband knows this story, and she says no. “So I’m the only one?” he asks, and she replied that he is. He is elated, and embraces her. His possession of her memories signifies a deepening of their relationship and a new found trust. That, or he’s simply happy to have something of hers that only he possesses.
In an internal dialogue after leaving Lui (who begs her to stay), Elle speaks to her German lover, and says that she’s found another impossible love, and that she’s told her story. She is terrified of forgetting him.
Elle splashes water on her face and she is reborn after telling the story of her “youth” and “madness” in love.
When she and Lui walk the streets together and her thoughts dominate the narrative, scenery from France and Japan flash back and forth, confusing time and place. Elle says, “I meet you. I remember you. This city was tailor-made for love. You fit my body like a glove. Who are you? You’re destroying me. I was hungry. Hungry for infidelity, for adultery, for lies and for death. I always have been. I had no doubt you’d cross my path one day…”
She is attracted to and comforted by Lui, but her journey is much more introspective. He continuously chases after her, but she knows that “staying is more impossible than leaving.”
Her climactic thought is “Silly little girl who died of love in Nevers–I relinquish you into oblivion.”
She doesn’t really, though, nor should she.
They visit a cafe late at night (Casablanca, a clear nod to another film of “impossible love”), and the sun  begins to rise overhead. Lui follows Elle back to her hotel room. She cries, “I’ll forget you! I’m forgetting you already!” This is a threat and a mournful realization all at once. She says, slowly, “Hiroshima,” and he covers her mouth. “Hiroshima,” she repeats. “That’s your name.
“Yes, that’s my name,” he says. “And your name is Nevers. Nevers in France.”
The sweeping narrative begins with discussion of place, of warfare and mass casualties narrows in on a couple, and a woman’s struggle with remembering, forgetting and mourning her past. At the end, they are again representative of their places in the world, and a complex, difficult history.
Hiroshima mon amour, as a cornerstone film in the French New Wave movement of the late 1950s and 1960s, offers us no answers or prescriptions for life. Instead, we are left aching–both for the “impossible” romance and the pain and emptiness of modern war.
The beginning of the film inundates us with images from after the bomb. As we drift farther into the narrative and farther away from those horrifying images, we forget what we saw. We forget the horrors. Hiroshima mon amour forces us to reflect on the power of memory, and more so, the power of forgetting.
Throughout the film, the relationship between the masculine and the feminine, remembering and forgetting and dealing with war from different perspectives tugs and pulls at Elle and Lui and at the audience. At the end, the impossible is made penetrable by accepting and absorbing these complex relationships all at once.

—–

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. 

Director Spotlight: Agnès Varda

Agnes Varda
I came to Agnès Varda late and by accident. A couple of years ago, scanning Netflix for something interesting to watch, I found The Gleaners and I, and determined it was one of my favorite movies in a very long time. Only then did I look her up and learn how famous and influential she is—something I would have already known if I’d formally studied film. What I love about Varda is her playful intellectualism. She doesn’t take herself too seriously—and it shows in her films—yet she treats her film subjects with love and great care. Her protagonists are often women who live interesting, difficult, and complicated lives.
Varda’s consuming interest in film as a medium for artistic and sensory inquiry, rather than a mode of entertainment, is a quintessentially French trait. It is also, for this lover and maker of images that live beyond their frame, a trusty bohemian credo.
I have a bit of a difficult time with French New Wave films; while I can see they are beautiful pieces of art, they don’t always capture me—I can’t quite get inside them. They don’t have the kind of heart I’m looking for in a movie. Varda’s films do—they’re beautiful on the surface (form) and below it (content), and manage to do all of this without a hint of pretension. This is one of the reasons why she is my favorite filmmaker. Here is a sampling of her films.

La Pointe-Court (1955)
Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962)

Daguerréotypes (1976)

Vagabond (1985)

The Beaches of Agnés (2008)