Frances Ha (2013)
Directed by Noah Baumbach
No — Frances Ha is not woke, scoring 9 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha arrives in black and white, shot on a consumer camera, following a 27-year-old apprentice dancer through Brooklyn, Sacramento, Paris and a series of increasingly humiliating couches.
Consciousness Markers
The film centers a woman's interior life and a female friendship, and was co-written by its star, but it treats these as natural subject matter rather than advancing an explicit feminist thesis.
The film observes class friction — trust-fund roommates, a Goldman Sachs boyfriend, Tribeca versus Washington Heights — but as wry social texture rather than an eat-the-rich polemic.
The cast is overwhelmingly white, with no meaningful racial diversity in the principal or supporting roles; the film makes no effort at inclusive casting.
Baumbach's film is observational and ambling rather than preachy; it offers no direct moral instruction to the audience.
There are no LGBTQ+ characters, relationships, or themes anywhere in the film.
Race is essentially absent as a subject; the film's social observations are entirely about class and creative ambition within a white milieu.
No environmental or climate themes appear in the film.
No body-positivity themes or messaging are present.
Frances is quirky and aimless, but the film never frames her as neurodivergent or engages with any such concept.
The film is a contemporary character study with no historical subject matter to revise.
Why it received this score
Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha arrives in black and white, shot on a consumer camera, following a 27-year-old apprentice dancer through Brooklyn, Sacramento, Paris and a series of increasingly humiliating couches. Greta Gerwig co-wrote the script and plays the title character, an aimless woman whose best friend is drifting upward into Tribeca while she drifts downward into Chinatown and then Washington Heights. The camera loves her. The screenplay declines to love anyone else quite so much.
The picture's social observation runs almost entirely along lines of class and creative ambition, and it runs gently. Lev and Benji have parents who pay the rent. Patch works at Goldman Sachs and gets promoted to Tokyo. Frances resents all of it, but the film never builds a case, it just notices. The result is texture, not argument. Her interior life and her friendship with Sophie are treated as legitimate subject matter, which in 2013 was still being remarked upon, though the film itself never makes a speech about it. Gerwig's name on the screenplay is the more pointed statement.
Elsewhere the ledger is bare. The cast is white throughout, and race never enters the frame as a subject, a silence the film does not seem to notice. There is no queer presence, no environmental concern, no engagement with the body as a political site, and no suggestion that Frances's flailing might be a diagnosis. She is simply a person who is bad at being 27. Baumbach observes and withholds judgment, which is why the film never lectures. It ends on a folded slip of paper and a name that does not fit. Modest, wry, and content to leave its audience alone.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
An aspiring dancer moves to New York City and becomes caught up in a whirlwind of flighty fair-weather friends, diminishing fortunes and career setbacks.
Questions about Frances Ha
Is Frances Ha woke?
No — Frances Ha is not woke, scoring 9 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does Frances Ha have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Feminist Agenda at 25.
How does Frances Ha compare to other 2013 movies?
It ranks #127 of the 274 films from 2013 we've scored; their average is 14. The wokest is Belle (76).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.