Frances Ha turns thirteen soon. How’s she doing?

Brief diary-like thoughts on my first time watching Greta Gerwig's origins

Rather embarrassingly late, I watched Frances Ha last week.

My frontal lobe only just developed - give me a break!

Maybe it was all the MUBI marketing, maybe it was the sudden absence of Greta Gerwig’s name from all the girlhood commentaries - I don’t know. But, with the nights creeping earlier and the cold settling in, I felt like a Baumbach-Gerwig black & white spectacular would ease me into a seasonal melancholy.

Even just ten minutes in, I kind of wished I was watching it in a cinema - instead, I was in my living room with the dreaded Big Light on. Said Big Light felt a little like a Truman Show-esque spotlight at times, especially during Gerwig’s performance as a jealous-yet-clueless excuse of an adult. As a result, the stilted dialogue and the very apparent French New Wave stylistics didn’t seem to elicit the same appreciation from me as it would have in a tiny cinema screen with uncomfortable seats (avec under-salted, over-priced popcorn, of course.)

For those of you that are uncool enough to have not seen Frances Ha yet (not judging, that was me literally seven days ago), it’s a humbling tale about the second lot of growing up we’re all prescribed by force in our mid-twenties. Having only just hit that milestone myself, I wonder whether this film will resonate a little stronger with me in roughly three years; when I’m teetering on the edge of my thirties.

Frances herself has a dream, desire, determination to be a dancer but hasn’t quite realised that people stop thinking dreams are cool when they get a ‘real’ job. For a film that released in 2012, it’s hauntingly resonant with today’s pitless divide between the employees and the freelancers.

Though, that’s just one take on the constant comparison between Frances and her ‘best friend’ Sophie. The other take is that they’re lucky to have a beautiful friendship but they’re encumbered by the chasm growing between them: eroding into the shapes of long-term partnerships, middle-class Tribeca apartments and donor-status charity galas.

As titled, this film is about to turn thirteen. It’s growing up, and tween life is ugly life. Although, it should be noted most tweens don’t get a chance to be ugly nowadays. And in that vein, I don’t think Frances Ha is going to be cool to teenagers this time round. The irony: as it becomes one itself, it’ll fade out of relevance.

Before I expand, I want to reiterate that I don’t believe Frances Ha is a bad film. Quite the opposite: I think it’s well written, gorgeously shot and makes me wish I was old enough to appreciate the Tumblr edits that could have sprung from this.

So why do I think it’s going to be replaced? Because I don’t think the next cohort of mid-twenty-ers are going to appreciate it as much. We would have had nearly three whole generations affected by outpriced rents, poor creative pay and the loss of giddy friendship - and I just don’t think it’s going to hit the same.

So as Frances Ha ventures into young adulthood and I crawl my way out of it, watch it before it feels too distant; whether that’s because of the growing apathy towards quashed passions for the sake of bulkier payslips or another Baumbach steps onto the scene to break your twenty-year-old heart in your thirty-year-old body one more time.