Some thoughts on Frances Ha (2012).
Why is your favorite movie your favorite movie?
Why is your favorite movie your favorite movie?
I first watched Frances Ha the night I was supposed to have sex for the first time. I was laying on a Twin XL mattress with someone who, at the time, I thought was "my person". She was my first girlfriend and we watched on a laptop propped on its side, open like a book, atop a desk dragged to the center of her Upper West Side dorm room. Halfway through, we paused to plan our night: we'd put on fancy clothes, head to her Spring Formal (which I'd driven to New York to attend), come back, finish the movie, and then have sex, or try our best to. We agreed the order of the last two items could be flipped, mood depending.
We didn't even make it to the ball. A regrettable comment as we got dressed spiraled into the kind of sidewalk argument you, as a passerby, learn to ignore. Through tears, she went to stay the night at her friend's while I, with nowhere else to go, returned to her dorm room. After some sulking, I pulled out my laptop and watched the last forty minutes of Frances Ha alone.
The second time I watched Frances Ha, one month later, I was single. I spent the viewing wondering if Greta Gerwig's performance was the worst I'd ever seen, or brilliant.
I watched it again, a third time, another month after that.
Frances Ha is a movie about two best friend roommates in New York, Francis and Sophie, who are broken up by an expiring lease, a Goldman Sachs boyfriend, and diverging class trajectories. 13 minutes into the film, Sophie tells Frances her friend, Lisa, has offered a more appealing living situation. Frances is left unmoored and, for the next 77 minutes, we follow her spinning through the city looking for new people and places to fill the Sophie-sized hole in her heart. It is a movie about what happens when you lose "your person" before you are one yourself.
Frances' post-Sophie living situations are, by her own doing, precarious and ephemeral. The film commemorates the addresses of each in title cards. 682 Vanderbilt Ave, 22 Catherine St, etc. Prior to watching the movie, I had myself been unmoored, though by choice, after dropping out of school to become a designer or writer or filmmaker. Whichever it was, I knew it had to be in New York. So I took a bus to the city and, misguided by a desire for ultimate flexibility, spent those early days hopping between Airbnbs, often in two or three day increments, usually around Bushwick. Maybe my title cards for that time would also include the names of my hosts: Blake and Madia, Emily and Mandy, Erica and Jorel, Nicole, Skyler, Jasmine, Sira.
Noah Baumbach says there are "no unmotivated camera moves" in the film. This is not true. As he obviously knows: the seventh to last shot of the movie, a medium close up push in on Frances in her new apartment. This apartment — 97 Audubon Ave — is one she can finally, the camera screams, call her own.
My own first New York apartment — 511 Throop — came with 3.5 bedrooms and 3 roommates. Two of the roommates I knew well from work on a feature film nobody would ever see. The third roommate was a stranger. We'd met a few weeks prior as a formality. Third Roommate seemed not like a serial killer and like he’d do his dishes, not that I really cared about the latter. He said he liked movies too.
My fourth and fifth Frances Ha viewings took place during my time living at 511 Throop.
When Third Roommate told me he hated Frances Ha, I took it as a promising sign of budding closeness. I eventually learned he was just honest like that to everyone.
As it goes, Third Roommate and I would live together for five years across multiple apartments and lifetimes in the city. We coached each other through breakups, got addicted to nicotine, avoided addiction to kratom, took shrooms upstate, kicked out a roommate, almost crashed an uninsured drone, moved into a two bedroom loft, rotated freelance stints at the same startups, drove each other to the hospital, drove cross country during COVID, and whatever else you do with "your person" in your 20s. Third Roommate was my Sophie. Given that, maybe I should have been less surprised when, one afternoon, he told me he was considering not renewing our lease. Two of his college friends had pitched him on finding a new place all together.
"I sort of thought we were going to renew our lease," Frances to Sophie. "Yeah, but we never talked about it," Sophie to Frances.
Third Roommate and I fell in love, about a year into knowing each other, with a plastic video camera. It fits in your palm and records in lo-fi 480p, but without any of that kitschy Instagram nostalgia-porn feeling. It was fragile and we cared for it dearly with scotch tape and custom rigs. We brought it on drives, upstate, to Fourth of July, and Applebees. One day, I used it to document Third Roommate and his then-girlfriend on a day in the city. I cut the footage into a short montage, named it "Your Person", and, as the audio track, added the monologue from Frances Ha:
“It’s like that thing where you are with someone and you love them and they know it, and...you look across the room and catch each other’s eye not because you are possessive or that it’s precisely sexual but because that is your person in this life... and it’s a secret world that no one else knows about... that’s what I want out of a relationship. Or just life, I guess,” excerpts from Frances, drunk at a dinner party.
After learning Third Roommate might not renew, I watched the movie I watch whenever I needed to watch it. This sixth viewing felt like a coda. For the first time since arriving in the New York, I could imagine leaving. The movie felt, no longer like a mirror or a magnifying glass, but a chapter I was on the precipice of closing. Two days later, I watched the film again, this time with Third Roommate. We had never seen it together. I told him it was "relevant". I suppose I didn't quite know how to express, without seeming too insane or possessive or unreasonable, the thought of losing my person. And, even if he left, I wanted him to know how I felt. I hoped the movie would say whatever needed to be said for me.
"It’s just... if something funny happens on the way to the deli, you’ll only tell one person... and I’ll never hear about it," Frances to Sophie, regarding losing her person.
Near the end of the film, Sophie gets into an argument with her now-fiancé, Patch. It’s the type of sidewalk argument you, as a passerby, learn to ignore. Through tears, she goes to spend the night at a friend's. Frances lets her in and they lay together on a Twin XL mattress, dreaming big dreams about living close together again one day.
Third Roommate decided not to move out. One year later, I did. A year into dating someone long distance, I started to believe she might be my person. I told Third Roommate I had to go to Los Angeles to find out.
I rewatched Frances Ha yesterday for research, curious if there were any relevant moments I’d forgotten. There weren’t. This ninth viewing, if I'm honest, was my least compelling yet. Maybe because I forced it. Maybe because I had four wisdom teeth removed four hours earlier and had to keep replacing the gauze in my mouth to soak up the bleeding. Or maybe, now definitively past the age of the characters, there’s just a bit less there for me.
Third Roommate still lives in the loft, two years later, now with his person. She moved in a few months ago. The apartment has quickly become much nicer, with more plants, paintings, a second bookshelf, a larger more colorful rug. When I first saw its evolved form, I glimpsed some understanding of how the world moves forward, sometimes quite relentlessly, whether you're there or not. Third Roommate now sleeps in my bedroom, the larger one. I visit every time I’m in the city, usually multiple times. I’m told I can crash on the couch whenever I want. I paid for half of it.
I consider this a spiritual successor to Some Thoughts on New York, my last stack.
I promised myself I’d write five Substacks before evaluating if I want to keep it up. This is my fourth.
My wisdom tooth recovery is going well.
reading this was like rewatching Frances Ha
please keep substacking this is really good. it reminded me to call My Person