I wish we had cookies; I wish we had Chessmen

Frances Ha

Crit

Gosh, young people really are young, aren't they? If I were ever going to reject a film because I have scarcely anything in common with the young people therein, it wouldn't be The Breakfast Club, which has plenty more to disrecommend it. It'd be something more like this--but hey, you gimme Greta Gerwig running down New York City streets while Bowie sings "Modern Love," and what am I gonna do?

Some have called this a Gen Y Annie Hall, and I wouldn't go that far, but director and cowriter (with Gerwig) Noah Baumbach has clearly studied that text; the most pointed allusion is a pair of scenes that invoke the lobster scenes in AH. Also Allenesque, though without a direct coefficient in AH, is what I would title The Saddest Trip to Paris Ever.

If I have a gripe, it's that Baumbach seems to attribute to his audience the same flitting attention span often attributed to the demographic he's looking at. We know from his previous films that he can develop a scene, so he must be marrying form to content here--especially inasmuch as the one excruciatingly long scene puts the emphatically postadolescent Frances at a dinner table with people who, while not necessarily older, are ostentatiously grown up.

But hey: I come back to this: 86 minutes spent mostly looking at that face. What could be wrong?

Trailers

• Ain't Them Bodies Saints--Texas noir with Rooney Mara, Casey Affleck, and Ben Foster.
• Before Midnight--Need you ask? By the way, does somebody out there have my copies of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset?