Frances Ha snuck up on me to become my favorite film of the year. Maybe it’s the fact that co-writer and star Greta Gerwig writes marvelously human women, plays them well and happens to be an utter joy to watch move. Maybe it’s that co-writer and director Noah Baumbach shoots New York, California and Paris in a way that places his individual characters into the context of the world around him, knows how to write a witty conversation with individual character voices and has great empathy for screw-ups. Maybe it’s that Mickey Sumner’s Sophie is a great performance for a great arc. Maybe it’s that Frances Ha successfully captures the wide range of emotions that any one person will experience over the course of a year, especially in the course of growing up. But if I had to narrow the reason I think so highly of Frances Ha as a film down to one single thing, it would be that it gets friendship with a best friend right.
A friendship, particularly a close friendship, is not a static relationship. Lives that run close to each other will affect each other, and in turn affect the relationship. When Frances Ha begins, Frances and Sophie are best friends who live together and are consequently quite close. They have routines. They often sleep in the same bed. They have shared jokes, in particular “The Story of Us,” a fantastic version of their lives in a few years. Frances likes to say that they’re “The same person with different hair.” They laugh, and often.
And then, when Sophie decides to move out, the friendship changes. Frances chafes at the reduced amount of time she can spend with her best friend, and their increasing differences. She loves her roommates, Sophie is ambivalent about them beyond thinking that they have a “total rich kid apartment.” Frances finds Sophie’s boyfriend Patch (Patrick Heusinger) boorish, while Sophie gets increasingly serious about her relationship. Frances struggles to accept that she might not be a good enough dancer to make a career out of it, while Sophie continues with her career at Random House. They have a fight about their lives going different ways before Christmas that strains the friendship badly, and they do not speak for some time. Just as they begin to reconnect, Sophie and Patch move to Japan, and Frances misses their going away party due to a disastrous, poorly planned trip to Paris. Sophie becomes a distant figure for Frances, someone she loves but doesn’t know as well as she used to. Frances Ha‘s best, most moving scene follows shortly afterwords, when Frances and Sophie are unexpectedly reunited.
Frances takes a job at her old college to get away from New York, to pretend she is doing something with her life and to pay off the debt from her Paris trip. While catering a reception, she runs into Sophie and Patch, who are back in the US for a family funeral. The couple are going through a rough patch, and Sophie has responded to stress by dragging her fiance up to her old college and getting as drunk as she possibly can. Later that night, a thoroughly inebriated Sophie ends up at the dorm Frances is working as an RA in, asks to stay, and promptly throws up in Frances’ trash can. As they lie in bed, Frances and Sophie talk about the stresses Sophie has been going through, and briefly indulge in a fantasty of Sophie leaving Patch and living with Frances as they used to. This does not happen, and Sophie leaves the next morning, but not without leaving a note reaffirming her love for her best friend. Frances subsequently puts her own life back together, and finds satisfaction working as a choreographer. She directs a well-regarded dance, and as she makes her way through the party, shares a brief, wordless moment with Sophie, who is now happily married. Their lives are taking them in different directions, and they will never again have the same constant intimacy that they had as roommates, but they will always be best friends.
Frances and Sophie’s reconciliation is an effective piece of filmmaking because it combines witty screenwriting and strong character work from Gerwig and Sumner with a very deep understanding of the nature of being best friends. There are people in life whom you love unconditionally. You may venture far from each other. Your lives will, by the nature of your being human, almost certainly go in different directions. You may even fight, and have to make up for hurt. But as Frances puts it, your best friend is “that person in your life.” It is the sort of closeness where, on some level, you will always be in sync with and care for that person.
Frances Ha takes that wonderful, powerful love and puts it on screen through Frances and Sophie’s friendship – in that moment, when Frances is coaching Sophie through being drunk and Sophie is sharing some of the fears she has long kept bottled up, Frances Ha uses the medium of film to depict one of the great, wonderful things about being human and gets it absolutely right. It’s a marvel of a moment from a marvel of a movie from a marvel of a year.
