Frances Ha · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

She runs. The Bowie comes up, the camera swings alongside her, and Frances Halladay goes leaping down a Manhattan sidewalk in one unbroken burst of motion. It's the shot everyone keeps from this movie. Watch it twice and something odd surfaces: nothing is different at the end of the block. She's still broke. She's still an apprentice at a dance company that has quietly stopped needing her. Sophie is still leaving. The run accomplishes nothing at all, and it's the happiest thing in the film.

Baumbach didn't invent that shot and isn't hiding it. Leos Carax put Denis Lavant on a street to the same Bowie track in Mauvais Sang, and Frances Ha restages it nearly beat for beat: the blocking, the lateral camera, the needle-drop. Behind that sits Truffaut, whose The 400 Blows worked out the grammar of a camera travelling beside one solitary person crossing a city, and Godard's Bande à part, which taught movies that people can simply break into movement in public and the film will follow. Sam Levy's handheld camera is running on a fifty-year-old debt. What's new is who's running, and what it's for.

Here is where a piece of film theory earns its keep. Deleuze's two cinema books turn on a single break. For roughly the first half-century of movies, the image was organized by a circuit he called the movement-image: a character perceives a situation, the perception loads into an act, the act changes the situation. Cause, effect, resolution; editing exists to keep that chain tight. After the war it started to fail. Filmmakers built characters who could see their situation perfectly well and do nothing effective about it. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image, and he catalogued its symptoms: dispersive situations, a scatter of loosely connected people who never add up to a plot; weak links, scenes that follow one another without causing one another; and the balade, the trip that transforms nothing.

That's a checklist, and Frances Ha ticks it with a light foot. The people around Frances form a loose network — Sophie, Lev, Benji, a gallery of dinner-party acquaintances with family money. They thin out, reappear, and almost nothing they do converts into consequence for her. Jennifer Lame's editing enters scenes late and leaves early, so the film is constantly declining to show you the causal joint. And then Paris. The largest thing Frances does in this movie is fly to Paris for a ruinous weekend she cannot afford, and she comes back with less money and the same life. It is the balade in its purest comic form.

Why does that framing open the film instead of just relabelling it? Because without it the temptation is to read Frances as a case study — immature, self-sabotaging, due for growth — and the movie as a shapeless hangout comedy that eventually locates a moral. Deleuze's account says the shapelessness is the content. The form isn't failing to be a plot; it's the accurate shape of a life in which perception vastly outruns available action. You can see exactly what is happening to you and have no lever. Twenty-seven, credentialed, unaffordable city, post-recession: that's a structural condition, and Baumbach and Gerwig found a comic form for it instead of a diagnosis.

The structural invention is the address card. A white intertitle, an apartment, and we're somewhere new. Baumbach takes the device from Jules et Jim, where on-screen text let Truffaut leap across years without ceremony, and repurposes it as bookkeeping. Frances's serial dislocations become the plot, in the sense that they're the only thing that keeps changing. Each card promises a chapter. Each chapter turns out to be the same chapter, in a room belonging to someone else.

Which points at what the film is actually watching: a body. Deleuze's late writing turns from action to what he calls a cinema of the body, films whose content is attitude and posture, the way people carry fatigue and waiting and self-presentation. Frances is a trained body that has been told, politely, that it isn't needed. Gerwig co-wrote the part, so the writing and the performing can't be pulled apart, and she builds Frances out of gait: the slightly wrong walk, the enthusiasm that overshoots and then visibly collapses. Deleuze has a term for a posture that gives away a social relation instead of a private feeling — the gest. Put Frances at a dinner party among people with money and watch her body do the class analysis the dialogue is too well-mannered to make. She is the only one performing taste, and it's in how she sits.

The monochrome works on the same problem. This was shot in colour on a Canon DSLR and graded to black-and-white afterward, so the gray was chosen in a room after the fact. Deleuze describes an absorbent colour, one that takes a scene and its feeling into itself. The gray here absorbs money. It flattens the wardrobes and apartments and haircuts that the screenplay is otherwise counting obsessively, so everyone photographs equally solvent while the script keeps score. Manhattan is the obvious ancestor and the useful contrast: Allen's widescreen black-and-white monumentalizes the city into romance, while Baumbach's makes it democratic and slightly weightless. The music does something similar. Instead of commissioning a score he lifts Georges Delerue's existing cues from Truffaut, a borrowed orchestral swell for a woman living in borrowed rooms.

Now go back to the run. Deleuze noticed that in musicals the dancer stops being the source of movement and gets taken up by it: the world moves and the body is carried. He calls it the movement of world. That's the Bowie sequence exactly. Frances isn't running toward anything. The street, the song and the camera are doing the moving, and she has consented to be carried. It's the one stretch where her body is the right size for the space it's in, and it lasts a block.

There's one more thing she does constantly, and it isn't lying. She announces versions of herself, the dancer, the person about to be fine, slightly ahead of the evidence. Deleuze's word for this is fabulation: people caught in the act of legending themselves into existence, which he treats as invention rather than dishonesty. Frances is composing a Frances. The film's title is that project caught mid-sentence — her name is Halladay, and what we get is Frances Ha.

Two things this film did. Technically, it proved the New Wave's founding argument was available again. The realism Bazin argued for and Truffaut practised was an economics before it was a style: small cameras, real light, streets nobody paid for. A DSLR handed Baumbach that freedom in 2012 New York, which is why the film has genuine New Wave mobility instead of a tribute to it. Narratively, it made the crisis-form funny. Films of drift had mostly been films of desolation. Frances Ha keeps the entire broken circuit — no resolving action, no transformation, an ending that repairs without promising success — and makes it buoyant, which had not obviously been possible. The afterlife is large: the Baumbach–Gerwig partnership that continued through Mistress America and on into Gerwig's own authorship, an editing rhythm Jennifer Lame carried into Marriage Story and beyond, and a decade of films about precarious young people that could now be made as art.

Watch it again and try this. Don't track what Frances achieves; track what carries her. Music, friends' furniture, other people's plans, a street. The film leaves open whether that's a life stalled or a life lived at the only speed available to it, and it refuses to settle the question, which is why the last stretch feels like relief. And why the run stays with you. Nothing happens. She's magnificent.