Watched Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s Frances Ha tonight. Gerwig is both insufferably cute and overwhelmingly charming, in a story that is a tribute to her commitment as a writer and actor to her vision of life as a melding of grace and grit. Here it’s filtered through the lens of French movies of the early sixties, notably those of Francois Truffaut, which starred Jean Pierre Leaud playing Truffaut’s alter ego. Frances Ha Gerwig seems to play her own alter ego in a similar style.
In tribute to the Nouvelle Vague, Frances takes and impetuous trip to Paris when she is offered a pied a terre in the Sixth Arrondissement. The montagey staging of her visit is punctuated by Hot Chocolate’s fantastic “Everyone’s A Winner,” which is featured tonight to a much different purpose. Bon soir.