Before You See ‘Mistress America’ This Weekend, Watch Its Unofficial Prequel, ‘Frances Ha’

Out this weekend is Mistress America, the latest collaboration from filmmaking power couple Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, whose contribution to the art of cinema was cemented with 2012’s release of (the arguably perfect) Frances Ha, which you have to watch before you see their newest New York story.

Mistress America stars Gerwig opposite as thirty-something Brooke, who befriends her younger stepsister-to-be, Tracy (up-and-comer — and sister to Girls’ Jemima — Lola Kirke), amid her own personal and professional crises aided by a hefty case of denial. Though seemingly in blind awe of Brooke and her Times Square commercial apartment, Tracy secretly gathers all of the material she can on her new pseudo sis in an effort to cook up a juicy story that will hopefully get her in to Barnard’s prestigious literary club.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6z8MCW16uZY]

In an interview with The New York Times, Gerwig (who co-wrote the film) and director Baumbach explained their various inspirations for Mistress, citing ‘80s screwball comedies like Scorsese’s After Hours and Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild; the latter of which Gerwig introduced and screened before her own film at a recent IFC Center special event. Without some kind of explanation from Gerwig herself — between the Times spotlight and her in-person briefing — I’m not sure I would have necessarily appreciated Mistress as much as I could have. In fact, I distinctly remember squirming anxiously in my seat, unsure if I was even enjoying the film as it played before me. I thought, What the hell is wrong with me? Why can’t I get into this? This is not Frances Ha, that’s for sure. I chalked it up to just having watched a screwball comedy immediately before on top of forgetting to eat dinner.

After the credits rolled, however, I found myself overwhelmed by the thought of Mistress America the next day. And the day after that. And the week after that. The film is infectious, plain and simple, except it took me a little while to figure out why. During her IFC presentation, Gerwig explained that she wanted to create somewhat of a “dangerous” lead because those kind of female characters have all but “disappeared” from cinema. Think of Melanie Griffith’s Audrey in Something Wild, who more or less kidnaps Jeff Daniels’ Charlie, takes him on the road trip of his life, dumps him, almost gets him killed by her ex (Ray Liotta), then decides to track him down after the dust has settled. To call her a protagonist is a stretch because, like Charlie, we have no idea who will make it out alive.

Brooke isn’t kidnapping strangers in Mistress America, but she’s a unique kind of force that leaves both Tracy and the audience wondering what could possibly happen next. Part of me thinks I was so hesitant to fall in love with Mistress because it’s almost nothing of what I expected. Gerwig is right: these kinds of women have disappeared from the silver screen, which is a crying shame. In Brooke, we’re introduced to a character from the past (reiterated by a scene in which her psychic tells her she’s an old soul): a woman who’s made it in the big city, enjoyed a solid decade of Manhattan life, and is now left wondering about the next step. “She was the last cowboy,” Tracy’s voiceover notes in the closing moments of the film, hammering home that Brooke never did make it out to the suburbs when it’s socially encouraged and is now stuck in an endless loop of monotonous denial about adulthood.

Which is why you must watch Frances Ha before you see Mistress America this weekend. If you haven’t had the privilege of seeing it yet, Frances Ha chronicles, in black and white, a few years in the life of a lackadaisical aspiring dancer named Frances (Gerwig), whose life is thrown for a loop when her best friend and platonic soul mate, Sophie (Mickey Sumner), moves out of their Brooklyn abode. Through a series of both adventurous and unwanted address changes, plus an impromptu trip to Paris, we get to know the whirlwind of contradictions that is Frances, who, like many of us, simply isn’t happy with settling down.

Fast forward to Mistress, and you have Frances reincarnated in Brooke: in her 30s and living it up, but still oh-so-restless and confused. She’s more or less saying, “Life wasn’t supposed to turn out this way, I’m not really living the life Twitter says I do, and what the hell happened to the plan?” It’s a different yet all-too-relevant New York story that stands as the unofficial second installment of Gerwig and Baumbach’s crusade for creating the much needed urban-dweller tales that Generations X and Y so desperately need. Much like the dangerous female protagonist, the quintessential New York muse has disappeared from cinema. We hang on to her in classics like Woody Allen’s Annie Hall and Manhattan, and are see remnants of her in Lena Dunham’s Girls (albeit through the skewed lens of Hannah Horvath). Mistress America stands not only as the informal sequel to Frances Ha, but also as a perennial love letter to New York City that this millennium has yet to see.

To be clear, Mistress America isn’t perfect. The bulk of the third act takes place in a glass house in Connecticut and features nearly a dozen, sometimes uneven, long-winded conversations that feel as if they belong on stage rather than in a Baumbach film. Not to mention the infuriating inability in actually getting to know Brooke, as she changes moods and costumes frequently. Yet there’s a shift at the edge of the second and third acts where you’re completely unsure how Mistress is going to end, and it’s nothing short of exhilarating. Gerwig and Baumbach admitted to the Times that they “wrote many versions of the second half [of Mistress America] — it could have gone a lot of different ways.”

Mistress America is not a film you should see just once. It’s a unique kind of filmmaking led by a new but simultaneously resurrected heroine who, to an irrational point, refuses to sit still. This restlessness, perhaps inadvertently, is inflicted on you as an audience member and, like it or not, will have you thinking about Brooke long after the last line of dialogue.

Mistress America is now in theaters, and you can watch Frances Ha on Netflix.

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Photos: Everett Collection