I really appreciated the feel. Definitely reminiscient of new wave but a well defined style of its own. The scene where the girl wants breakfast then it cuts to Frances serving breakfast and Frances and the two boys walking away from the door at the end of the night felt very new wave in a way that I loved!
shareAs in '80s French New Wave? Like "Diva"?
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Fight the storm.
French New Wave as in the French New Wave. The hugely influential movement of the late 50s and 60s headed by Godard, Truffaut, Malle, Resnais, etc. Ring any bells?
shareUh...yeah, French New wave didn't stop with those filmmakers, and extended well into the 2000's. Ring any bells? We got what you meant the first time Xyzzy was being specific. French New wave did not just have ONE formulaic way of telling a story so you could've at least been more specific rather than vague in your original post.
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Most consider the new wave to have ended in 1967, with a few stragglers carrying into the early 70s.
As for the OP: No, I don't consider the film to be that similar to a French New Wave film. Even in the more character oriented New Wave films they were more focused on moods, feelings, etc. and would pretty much always have this almost semi-surreal aspect rather than giving a more realistic character portrait. If anything Frances Ha is closer to Woody Allen's Manhattan.
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There were also numerous references to Francois Truffaut--there's a poster for L'Argent de Poche, a friend mentions a guy who looks like Jean-Pierre Leaud, and I'm fairly certain he used musical cues from Truffaut's films (the opening banjo piece as well as a romantic theme is from Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me).
A thread cut with a carving knife
That is what they call our life
I was already going to check this out but if I had been on the fence, this post alone would have gotten me to the theater. I just framed a Breathless poster for my wall last week. I've about exhausted the films of the French New Wave so if people are going to start making new ones I'm all for it!
shareI also felt that!
Just saw it now here in the imdb page, in "movie connections":
Les quatre cents coups (1959)
Score from "The 400 Blows" is used in the film.
Le mépris(1963)
Score from "Contempt" is used in the film.
Domicile conjugal (1970)
Score from "Bed & Board" is used in the film.
Yes! Upon watching the film it felt very much like this!
I'm not ugly. I'm avant-garde
Haha, look at the experts here discussing French New Wave.
You people don't even understand what it is. It's not a genre that you can attach to a movie. It's the same if you'd say about every color film: "Wow, this movie has a definite Technicolor feel to it, you know, like the first days the color came to the big screen."
Go read a little, then come back.
It does reference heavily French new wave, both the initial wave, and its 80s follow-up ; as it's been said before, a lot of the music is soundtracks from François Truffaut's films.
And of course, the "Modern Love" scene comes straight out of Leos Carax's "Mauvais Sang".
- A point in every direction is the same as no point at all.
This film is definitely French New Wave influenced. Anyone familiar with these films (mostly Truffaut's I would say) would see that.
I'm still trying to figure out if the Bowie dancing scene is a homage or a simple rip off of "Mauvais Sang", but since I liked it, I'll say homage. :)
It would be fun to try to list all the films referenced storywise to in Frances Ha.
I would say "Jules et Jim" at some point.
I've only watched two third so far, and like it alot.
Frances Ha is shot by Sam Levy in black and white, with elements of both the crisp and the crumpled. (One advantage of monochrome is that each crease or fold in an unmade bed suggests a vivid pencil stroke.) That stylistic choice aligns the film with Woody Allen’s Manhattan but also with the French new wave, to which there are copious references (notably the perky music of the late Georges Delerue, whose hundreds of scores include films by Truffaut and Godard, as well as an earlier US homage to that period, Paul Mazursky’s 1980 film Willie & Phil).
The allusions spread into French cinema in general. A glimpsed poster for Truffaut’s 1976 comedy Small Change suggests an inspiration for the picture’s skit-like structure. Frances’s celebratory sprint through Manhattan, her speeding steps giving way gradually to outright pirouettes, is a remake of an identical set piece in Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang (1986), only with the camera moving in the opposite direction. There’s even the same jerking, pounding song on the soundtrack: David Bowie’s “Modern Love”. The French new wave despatched love letters to the Hollywood of the 1940s. US film-makers reciprocated in the 1960s and 1970s. Frances Ha is merely keeping up this tradition of transatlantic correspondence SWALK.