Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2013)

Frances, a struggling dancer, shares a flat in Brooklyn with a friend who moves out, forcing her to reassess her life. A series of relocations follows, taking in various jobs and probings into relationships, until she ends up more or less back where she started, except living alone.
This is a film heavily influenced by Woody Allen's Manhattan/Annie Hall period, with the use of black and white clearly acknowledging the debt: very little of consequence happens and it is entirely driven by conversations revolving around how to live rather than any actual forward momentum. The character of Frances is symptomatic of this: flippant, irrepressible, flighty, knowing and aimless. It is a vivacious portrayal by Great Gerwig, and there are as many occasions when you laugh with her as you want to give her a kick up the backside, but humankind can only bear so much navel-gazing. Unsurprisingly Gerwig, the film's co-writer, has also worked with Whit Stillman, the uncrowned king of ineffectual and contrivedly quirky American middle-class introspection, now that Allen's output has dwindled to ever-decreasing circles around his original preoccupations.

5/10