Anna McKibbin
Céline Sciamma once explained, in an interview with Girls on Tops, “for me, it’s not like I live my life and I make films—I make films to live my life. Maybe it’s because I’m a woman.” Greta Gerwig has adopted a similar outlook in her work, engaging an audience eager to see the specific vulnerabilities of womanhood decorate each room and form every foundation. Gerwig has always used her work to unpick the lessons of childhood, reinvigorating quaint texts with fierce abandon.
Since Frances Ha’s release in 2013, Gerwig has been independent cinema’s wunderkind, building a following of similarly minded twentysomethings who recognized their own ferocious aimlessness in her stories. Her work is so synonymous with the coming-of-age narrative and the audacious protagonists it follows that it has worn away into triteness in cultural conversations. But what sets her films apart from others in this quirky ilk is how they are propelled forward by anger, earned through the disillusionment of growing up. In Barbie, Barbie (Margot Robbie) only succeeds when Gloria (America Ferrera) confronts her with the weight of inconsistencies which governs adult womanhood. Only through anger is the final act of Barbie possible—an exciting, passionate, sharp take on navigating the no man’s land between childhood and adulthood.
Before complicating this artifact of girlhood in Barbie, Little Women drew similar attention for its deconstruction of femininity. Gerwig forces the story to stare in at its own tragedy, coiling around Beth’s untimely death. Shifting between the grey, pallid tones of adulthood and warm hues of youth, the film forces its viewers to reckon with how childlike earnestness grows calcified and rigid unless tended to and cared for. Gerwig explained on IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast that she was overcome by the “unbearably heartbreaking” fact that once they are grown up, there is no point at which their paths reconverge; “I thought, “Oh, the thing you miss is already gone.’” The promise of adulthood is that your world will rapidly expand, but in practice it feels more like your independent world shrinks under a horizon of new options, made unlivable under the weight of decision. Or as Brooke phrases it in Mistress America, “You can’t really know what it is to want things until you’re at least 30. And then with each passing year it gets bigger, because the want is more, and the possibility is less.”
Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s script sees Mistress America change direction halfway through its runtime, moving from a coming-of-age dramedy into a contained farce in the glassy Connecticut mansion of Brooke’s high-school nemesis Mamie-Claire. When Brooke’s father calls to tell her that he won’t be marrying Tracy’s mother, Brooke is framed on the top of a rolling hill, suddenly struck by the emotion of this second-hand breakup. It is a moment strikingly similar in visual composition and emotion to Jo and Laurie’s split in Little Women. In both cases the film is suddenly filtered through a cold, autumnal light and the characters’ idealistic pursuits are exposed as futile in the midday glare. For Jo, Laurie, and Brooke, the world, in the way they envisioned it for themselves, crumbles around them even as the earth they are surrounded by remains impossibly serene.
Like Mistress America, Frances Ha was written by Gerwig and Baumbach and directed solely by Baumbach. But really these collaborations were clear expressions of her creative eye, one that favors the melancholic interplay between setting and people and encourages the audience to invest in this dynamic without forcing the camera to pry too far into someone’s internal life. Frances Ha’s black and white design can be immediately dismissed as pretentious, but there is a starkness that makes Frances’ (Greta Gerwig) circumstances unavoidable. The colorful layers that populate the scenes of this year’s highly anticipated Barbie—there to capture the chaos and charm of being young, beautiful and unburdened by practical use—are absent in Frances Ha. Instead, scenes are relegated to the barely furnished rooms of early adulthood, with nothing to focus on but the bodies and faces of people skirting around one another. Barbie, and her Barbies, are spared from the rigours of growing up, which demands a kind of inexhaustible physical purge, one that sees the toys once aimlessly scattered around, abandoned to make space for things practical and ugly. She similarly sees Lady Bird paint over the sickly-sweet pink of her bedroom walls to make space for a fresher, more grown up white.
Towards the end of Lady Bird, the title character is confronted by her sweet teacher, who is willing to look past her performative eccentricities to offer her some gentle redirection. In the midst of their conversation, Sister Sarah Joan argues: “Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?” It is a line so often quoted partly because it is an apt summary of the film’s ethos, a forewarning of the emotional final phone call from daughter to mother. But, like all pieces of wisdom, it is also subject to misinterpretation, “attention” being commonly treated as the operative word rather than the verb before it.
Gerwig has always been strategic about where she positions her camera, whether that means being observant and still in Lady Bird, or playful and moving in Little Women. In either case she is actively encouraging the audience and characters to situate themselves in the comfortably warm world before it unravels around them. Childhood often escapes before it is truly enjoyed—the thing you miss already gone—and Gerwig’s films are passionate pleas to hang onto those last waning moments of ease and safety, to really pay attention before the details slip away. Adulthood is long and colored by the excitement and tragedy of wanting. These films implore their characters to be held in the golden-tinted haze of being young, to enjoy the assurance of being wanted.
