Noah Baumbach wrote this movie with his girlfriend Greta Gerwig, and it seemed downright stupid not to cast her in the lead role as a 27-year-old dancer who shares an apartment in Brooklyn with her best friend (Mickey Sumner), but begins to drift when she’s forced to find someplace else to live. Gerwig and Frances seem like one person; that charm and youthful insecurity is the prime reason why it’s so enjoyable to follow Frances’s episodic adventures in New York City and elsewhere. The film should satisfy Woody Allen fans, but it’s also clearly a homage to French New Wave movies; Baumbach uses music scores from them (as well as a few pop classics) to great effect.

2013-U.S. 86 min. B/W. Produced by Noah Baumbach, Scott Rudin, Rodrigo Teixeira, Lila Yacoub. Directed by Noah Baumbach. Screenplay: Noah Baumbach, Greta Gerwig. Cast: Greta Gerwig (Frances Halladay), Mickey Sumner (Sophie Levee), Adam Driver (Lev Shapiro), Michael Zegen, Patrick Heusinger, Charlotte d’Amboise… Grace Gummer.

Trivia: That’s Gerwig’s actual mom and dad as Frances’s parents.

Last word: “I wanted to do something with Greta again, after we had done ‘Greenberg’, and I just wrote her. I wanted to make something in New York, and I was thinking, ‘Black and white, New York, Greta, portrait of youth’; I had very general, almost like a feeling of a movie, but not an actual movie in my head. And so I just wrote her about it and asked her if she had thoughts, of things she was thinking about. She wrote me back a document of stuff that was so great, and funny. I felt like there was a movie here, and it really became a conversation, from that point forward. A virtual conversation mostly, that then became a script.” (Baumbach, View London)

IMDb