Frances Ha

Why Frances Halladay is one of the most relatable film characters ever written (and maybe one of the most inspiring)

 Frances Halladay is a 27-year-old woman living in New York. She was born in Sacramento, California, and she moved to NYC in the hopes of starting an artistic career as a dancer. She is light-hearted, funny and quirky. She is herself, yet, strangely, she is also all of us. Life seems to be putting her on the ropes, as everything bad that could happen to her always happens, from being "fired" from the Christmas show she was supposed to do to tripping as she is running to get some cash to pay for dinner with the cool boy she met. Not only that, but everyone else, including her best friend Sophie, seems to be getting on with their lives. Life really doesn't seem to be her thing, but is it really the thing for anyone? "I'm tired", she says, "I am always so tired" - and we can't help but connect with her when she utters those words, because, deep down, we're all tired. Life is a tiresome business and Frances, with the honesty with which she was written by both Greta Gerwig (who plays her) and Noah Baumbach, helps us make sense of the confusion of life through how relatable she is. She isn't merely some girl struggling through life with big dreams living in the city of New York. She's the embodiment of the human condition in the modern world - that tiredness of life from a constant search for personal completion in this fast-paced world. And how she overcomes her challenges is how she becomes one of the most inspiring characters ever written.

 The first time we see Frances immediately tells us a crucial aspect of hers. We see her playing “fight” with Sophie, her best friend. They are laughing and attacking each other. Then we see them running in the park and goofing around. We hear their meandering talks about random subjects. In this opening montage that immediately captivates us to Frances’s story, we see the deep connection between Frances and Sophie and we also see a key aspect of Frances’s character – a playfulness and childishness, her immaturity. Frances isn’t really an adult; she is more a child in a grown-up’s body. She plays at being mature, so she becomes like everyone else who (seemingly) has their life together, but she always struggles with it, be it with irresponsible decisions or simply by failing at being mature almost constantly. As she remarks at one point, “this is so embarrassing, I am not a real person yet”. So, how can we relate to someone who is immature? My answer is: we relate to her precisely because of that. It’s this failure at adulthood that creates the “first layer of relatability” in her character. This is because, deep down, no matter how much we deny it, no matter how much we hide it, we all are just like her – immature adults failing at being an ideal of maturity. This maturity that we all associate with adulthood is nothing more than a performance, which some are better at than others, but it doesn’t change the fact that it is just that. I truly believe that maturity is as much an unrealistic idealization created by human beings as perfection is. None of us really knows what we are doing with our lives – we are simply legging it, all the time. It’s just how life is. And that’s what we see France doing - she is simply legging it through her confusing life. We witness her do that throughout the film, improvising and reacting to situations as they come, even if it’s something completely irresponsible as going to Paris on a whim. But she always finds a way to get on her feet and “leg it”, just like we all do (or at least we must do) with life. And that’s the first answer to why is she so relatable. She’s relatable because she is immature, and we all are too. She is her own person, but she is also all of us through that shared immaturity.

 One of the things I find in Frances’s character that is incredibly interesting is the proximity between her life and her creator’s, Greta Gerwig. She writes her character with extreme honesty, and this honesty with which her character is written is also what makes her so relatable because it makes her feel more real and palpable. She isn’t just a fictional character, she is a real person, as her characteristics are heavily based on a real person. It’s this flesh in her character that allows us to connect, understand her and relate to her struggles as a young adult in the 21^st century.

 And in this fast-paced century, there is something that we all feel a struggle in finding, which is feeling a connection with someone. It’s a longing that everyone feels, a constant need. And Frances goes all through the film in the search of this connection, striking attempts at this connection with numerous people. She had a connection with Sophie, but when she leaves her, Frances feels as if she has lost that connection and she tries to reconnect with someone who would be a surrogate of Sophie. In a scene, after she returns from Sacramento, having left NYC for the holidays, she asks her friend Rachel to stay in her apartment for a few months. Frances tries to emulate the relationship that we witnessed that she had with Sophie, but she fails. She tries to play “fight” with her, but Rachel doesn’t understand her playfulness and gets bothered by it. Later in a dinner with friends of Rachel, she tries to make the meandering dialogue that she did with Sophie but with the people in the dinner, who don’t really understand her and act as if she is just some strange funny girl. The most impactful moment of this evening is when Frances opens up about what she wants out of a relationship. She explains it in a very particular way, which goes right over everyone’s head. In a way this whole episode is representative of Frances’s search for a connection, a search for someone who will understand her for what she is and wants, the way that Sophie understood her. And I believe that this search is something that we all do – we all try to find someone who we can share a sort of dimension that nobody else is aware of, a dimension that only we and that person understand and know about. And it’s this search that motivates her character (apart from pure survival) that makes us relate and empathize with her.

 And then there’s a very particular point in the film where Frances does something that is sort of unexpected. She is given an opportunity to put some stability in her life – Colleen, the director of her dance company, proposes her a job as a secretary – and she refuses it, saying that she will do something on her own. When I watched Frances Ha for the first time this both bothered me and fascinated me and, so, I kept coming back to it to understand her decision, mostly because, strangely, I related to it – it looked exactly like something that I would do. But why would one do such a thing? Because of arrogance? Because of pride? The conclusion I reached is that she does so because of her insecurity. She doesn’t feel that she wouldn’t be able to have a stable job, maybe she felt that she wasn’t worthy of it, and that’s probably the deepest layer of Frances’s character that makes her so relatable. She is insecure above all else, just like we all, one way or the other, are. Most times we don’t feel worthy of good things that might happen to us, most times we doubt our abilities to do something, and so we refuse to go forward. And so, she keeps on doing gigs in order to survive – because of her insecurity.

 However, one day, she finds Sophie again and they reconnect. For the past few months, Frances has been seeing Sophie’s seemingly perfect life with Patch, her fiancé, in Japan, but, in this day that Frances sees her in the university she is working at, that performance of a perfect straight white couple is torn down. After a drunken afternoon that extends into the night, Sophie reveals how miserable she is with Patch. At this moment, Frances realizes that she doesn’t have any reason to hold herself back. When Sophie reveals that to her, she realizes that she isn’t the only immature person legging life as she goes through it, everyone does so, even if they seem as if their lives are perfect, stable and moving forward. It’s a perfect myth created by everyone without anyone even realizing it. As Frances realizes this, she realizes her own self-doubt and how unfounded it is. The next day, when Sophie leaves, Frances tries to run after her, but she’s already in the cab and unreachable. Frances looks down at her feet on the grey concrete and, at this moment, she realizes that she must take the next step. She must get out of the hole where she has put herself in, and that is done by moving on and seizing an opportunity. We can feel sorry for ourselves all we want, but that will never take us anywhere. We must swallow our self-pity and move forward. And that’s what Frances realizes at that moment as she looks down at her feet. She can’t keep chasing cabs barefoot, screaming for a name in the early morning. She must put herself together and become the person that she wants to be.

 And that’s what she does. She goes back to the company, accepts the job of secretary that had been offered to her, works on her own choreography and opens a show that is a success. With this ending to this story, Frances becomes much more than a relatable character - she becomes an inspiring one. We see in her ourselves mirrored – she truly is a mirror to all of us – and she is able to succeed on her own through her motivation and her overcoming of her insecurity, despite her immaturity (or maybe thanks to it). If she can do it, then we all can do so, we just need to do just that - overcome our insecurities and grasp at opportunities. We are all as immature as Frances, yet we can achieve something that we want just like Frances did.

 After the show, we see her talking with Colleen. While she’s talking with her, she catches sight of Sophie. They look at each other, and at that moment, they are in their own secret dimension.  Frances didn’t have to look any further to find that special person who shares her dimension. Frances and Sophie are each other’s persons in each other’s lives, and they have that connection they were searching for in the form of a deep friendship and understanding of each other. At this moment, what Frances said earlier comes true:

“It's that thing when you're with someone, and you love them and they know it, and they love you and you know it... but it's a party... and you're both talking to other people, and you're laughing and shining... and you look across the room and catch each other's eyes... but - but not because you're possessive, or it's precisely sexual... but because... that is your person in this life. And it's funny and sad, but only because this life will end, and it's this secret world that exists right there in public, unnoticed, that no one else knows about. It's sort of like how they say that other dimensions exist all around us, but we don't have the ability to perceive them. That's - That's what I want out of a relationship. Or just life, I guess.”

 In a fast-paced world, Frances is able to find her person in this life, and maybe we can also do that. Her connection was closer than she thought, and maybe our own is close than we think too. We just need to take that glance across the room and find it. Maybe it’s right there and we were too busy with our own desperation to see it.

 In the end, we see Frances finally in a proper apartment that she was able to afford on her own. We see her standing as an independent woman putting her life together, piece by piece, and we are given hope, turning her truly into one of the most inspiring characters that have ever been written. We are left with a shot of her name, or a part of her name, in her mailbox, in a playfully accomplished way: “Frances Ha”.