Frances Ha-ha-ha

How does it feel?” cries Bob Dylan. At 20, of course you don’t know the answer—you don’t care about the answer (this is more important). Maybe that explains why I wanted to slap and kiss and hug and roll my eyes at Frances Ha the whole two hours (in a luscious greyscale you would have thought impossible in the 21st century) I was made privy to her life: maybe because I (and thus all of us) am Frances Ha, or like to think that I am her or like her, or because (and this is more likely) I wanted to be like her: young and poor but with her whole life in front of her (and living as she is in one of the most beautiful cities in the world). Maybe we (I) long for this almost idyllic detachedness, this impossibility. Roger Ebert writes this of the movie:

The film’s shambling story is rooted in a particular passage of life. Frances Halliday (Gerwig) at age 27 finds herself in that Janus-like, post-college phase where part of her seems to want to retreat to the womb, or at least Vassar, while another part wants to forge confidently into the realities of grown-up life in New York.