Why Frances Ha (2012) deserves more recognition as a formally inventive film, not just an emotionally resonant one.

The conventional read of Frances Ha is a coming-of-age story about a young woman in New York discovering what she wants. That's accurate but incomplete.

Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach shot the film in black and white. This is not nostalgia. It's a formal argument about what kind of film this is — it's placing Frances explicitly in the tradition of the French New Wave, which is also where the film's episodic structure, its location photography, and its spontaneous quality come from.

But what the black and white also does is remove Frances from the present. The film is set in contemporary New York but doesn't quite feel like contemporary New York. Frances is slightly out of time — she has a relationship to dance and friendship and emotion that is slightly misaligned with the pragmatic world around her. The monochrome is a visual expression of that misalignment.

The ending of Frances Ha is hopeful in a way that's specific: she hasn't solved anything. She's still in the same city with the same ambitions and the same limited means. What's changed is smaller and more real: she can put her name on a door.