As Barbie approaches, Emily Maskell looks back at how the filmmaker’s nuanced female-centred character studies Lady Bird and Frances Ha show the messiness of growing up and finding your place in the world.
Watching Greta Gerwig’s films feels like coming home. The actress, screenwriter and director has developed quite a penchant for narratives that centre on the feminine and the familiar. Across the seven features she has written or directed (or both), Gerwig has crafted stirring portraits of womanhood that interrogate coming-of-age themes and capture her heroines in times of personal evolution. Girlhood, and the progression to womanhood, are presented not as linear emotional journeys, but quests for self-discovery fuelled by homesickness.
While all her features are nostalgic for youth, Lady Bird (2017) and Frances Ha (2012) can be classed as companion films for their comparable explorations of longing to find one’s place in the world. Some have even theorised that Frances Ha is a sequel to Lady Bird, since Saoirse Ronan’s Sacramento-dwelling teen moves to New York at the end of the latter film, which is where twentysomething Frances (also from the same California town) resides. Both movies are lived-in, wistful character studies that explore how the past comes to imprint on the present.
Lady Bird (2017)
Lady Bird chronicles a 17-year-old’s resentment towards her home, which she deems parochial and intellectually unstimulating. Charting a year in the life of the unwilling Catholic high-school attendee Christine ‘Lady Bird’ McPherson (Ronan), Gerwig’s directorial debut is a piercing mother-daughter drama set in the filmmaker’s own hometown of Sacramento. As Lady Bird creeps closer to graduating and leaving for university, her mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf) shuns her dreams of attending East Coast liberal-arts schools. With typical adolescent rebellion, the headstrong teen has nothing nice to say about her hometown and wants to go ‘where culture is like New York or Connecticut or New Hampshire’.
She writes a college letter, which she hopes will facilitate her escape from Sacramento, ruminating on where she grew up. Upon reading the application, her teacher says: ‘You clearly love Sacramento. You write about Sacramento so affectionately and with such care. It comes across as love.’ It comes as a shock to Lady Bird. She hadn’t consciously considered Sacramento’s charms, and yet her writing revealed her affection for them in spite of herself.
Lady Bird (2017)
The city has seen her through forlorn boyfriends, a broken arm, lazy summer days and cosy Christmases. Gerwig whisks through these details like they’re snippets from memories, moments to treasure for later. Lady Bird looks like a memory too, with a patina reminiscent of celluloid (despite being shot on digital). The film has a warm colour palette, a golden butterscotch tone that conjures the sweetness of youth and contrasts with Lady Bird’s bitterness. Even a ferocious fight between mother and daughter ends in them swooning together over a prom dress that will soon be preserved on film with a Polaroid snap that overrides the earlier conflict.
Later, a sequence of Lady Bird and her boyfriend Danny (Lucas Hedges) dancing in a garden of roses showcases the director’s dreamy visuals. It’s as if a core memory is being replayed. It arrives as a bittersweet moment of youth, a short-lived relationship that Gerwig still treats with the utmost affection. The writer-director concludes the film with Lady Bird flying the nest. She got her wish, to live in New York City, but as she settles in, she’s overcome by a longing for home, which leads her into a church for mass – a ritual she vehemently opposed during her schooling that now provides a source of comfort.
Lady Bird (2017)
In some respects, Frances Ha, despite predating Lady Bird, picks up where the other film left off. The black-and-white mumblecore drama is a love letter to formative friendships co-written by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. Gerwig plays Frances, a 27-year-old dancer and perpetual dreamer in New York City. She’s made a cosy home for herself with her ride-or-die best friend from college Sophie (Mickey Sumner). They’re a pair, so it’s as if Frances’ world is over when Sophie announces she’s moving out to live in her dream neighbourhood – which Frances can’t afford. Gerwig’s character is left pining for the home that was Sophie: the person who would fold her two arms around Frances and softly read to her. Without her, the four walls Frances lives within feel foreign.
In the wake of this heartbreak, the directionless Frances hops between apartments and jobs. Coping with the loss of her friend, as the festive season approaches she returns to her parents’ home in Sacramento. This decision isn’t framed as moving backwards; rather, it’s a chance to recalibrate. She revisits her youth by reconnecting with high-school friends and cycling down familiar streets.
Frances Ha (2012)
Frances is always pursuing the feeling of home, even though home as a physical space is constantly shifting. She even finds herself back in her college dorms for work, but being there – where she and Sophie first crossed paths – only exacerbates how much she misses her. Then, on a lonely solo Paris trip, she leaves Sophie voicemails adamantly claiming she’s doing well without her, though the subtext is clear: she’d do anything to return to the life they once shared together. Sophie represents a homeliness that Frances can’t help but crave. Like so many Gerwig characters, Frances lunges to find her place in the world, only to realise she must move at her own pace. In her late twenties, Frances is still deciding on the blueprint of her life – and that’s OK.
Frances Ha (2012)
Barbie, Gerwig’s next project, looks to further this focus on growing up and (re)finding home. For many of us who played make-believe within the plastic world of Mattel as children, the film’s bubblegum-pink iconography is bound to stir up nostalgia. The movie follows Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) venturing out of the perfect world of Barbie Land and into human reality. However, Mattel’s CEO (Will Ferrell) is on a mission to send them back, providing Gerwig the opportunity to retread familiar thematic territory of journeying through womanhood, while staying true to oneself. To quote Simone De Beauvoir, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’, which holds true in Greta Gerwig’s work. Whether exploring youthful nostalgia or adulthood self-discovery, her films have always, and seemingly will continue to, observe the world through this lifelong journey of becoming a woman.
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