Frances Ha.

The poster is the best thing about the film!

Intellectual, arty and middle class characters are in abundance in New York born Noah Baumbach latest film. A director who is probably best known for directing the well received The Squid and the Whale (2005) and one of Nicole Kidman’s lesser films Margot at the Wedding (2007). This time he has written and directed, in conjunction with his partner and lead star Greta Gerwig, Frances Ha (2012) a rather meaningless black and white film that could have learned a lot from the Mike Leigh’s 2008 movie Happy Go Lucky and its lead character Poppy Cross played by the always exceptional Sally Hawkins.

27 year old Frances Handley (Gerwig) is just one of the irritating characters in the movie where most of the people are so far up their own backsides that there isn’t any one you would empathise with.  The story is told in a series of addresses where Frances ends up residing, when the film opens she is sharing with her best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner) but her boy friend is trying to persuade her to move in with him but she would rather stay with her friend. Attempting to earn her living as an apprentice dancer, although she’s not built like one, she moves from sharing one apartment to another, travelling home for Christmas with her parents and spending two uneventful days in Paris on her own. And that’s all that really happens in this in-joke of a movie. Billed as a ‘laugh out loud funny’ its nothing of the kind. In fact it’s not even funny! As you can probably tell this film did not appeal to me in the slightest, still you can’t win them all.