the groundhog day project

Early in France's Ha , France's quotes Sincerity and Authenticity by Lionel Trilling (1972): "To praise a work of literature by calling it sincere is now, at best, a way of saying that although it need be given no aesthetic or intellectual admiration..." and the sequence of France's and Sophie moves on to another interaction, part of a series that establishes a) their sisterly closeness--Frances compares them to a lesbian couple that no longer has sex--and b) their lack, of a sort, of real maturity. That line from Trilling continues: "it was at least conceived in innocent of heart." And, I think, sincerely, that the choice of this quotation by Baumbach was deliberate. See, in context (of Trilling, not the film, though I'll get to that), Trilling has gone over the origin (latin sincerus meaning "clean, or sound, or pure" and really meaning that whatever is being modified has "not been tampered with." He has covered a sort of his...

France's Ha is not feminist. It just happens to be centered around a woman, France's (Greta Gerwig). A woman of 27 who isn't quite managing to, in the modern parlance, adult.           And, I've never seen it before (though I have liked other Baumbach films, I never got around to this one), and I think I'm rather enjoying it. Its description on Netflix is odd: Determined to make it as a modern dancer in New York, a young woman pursues her unlikely goal with more enthusiasm than natural talent. Now, to be fair, the film is not quite over as I'm writing this. But, 1) France's definitely does not do anything with notable enthusiasm. She explicitly has trouble leaving places, getting up, getting out of her apartment. She wants to be a dancer, sure, and hell, maybe she's got more enthusiasm than talent there, but 2) the film is just not about that. That's just one tiny aspect of Frances' life. More of the film deals with her increasingly d...