Performances

Who’s That Woman?: Mickey Sumner in Frances Ha

By Kyle Turner

Features—

Oct 21, 2021

Who’s That Woman?: Mickey Sumner in <em>Frances Ha</em>
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I wonder if they saw each other from across the room while looking for a fun-house reflection of themselves. I wonder if they found in each other a secret little world. Regardless, Greta Gerwig and Mickey Sumner met at a party where Gerwig hustled Sumner in a round of Bananagrams, a game that foregrounded their complementary vibrations. Gerwig later claimed that she had “engineered” the moment, pretending she was a novice but knowing full well that she was good at it—and Sumner was happy to play along. Gerwig’s euphoric gamesmanship can be found in her performance in the title role of Frances Ha, a film she cowrote with director Noah Baumbach. Sumner, who auditioned and won the role of Frances’s friend Sophie, functions as something like a straight man to the lead’s hurricane of unpredictability: she’s the necessary play pal, and just like in that game of Bananagrams, she needs Gerwig to keep her on her toes and parry her every spar.

Even as Sophie serves as a foil, she is also a mirror, one in which Frances can see herself as she was, as she is now, and as she would like to be. The mirror concept is introduced in the film’s opening shot, which shows the two friends in a park, facing one another. Sophie’s hands are up, maybe in offense or maybe in defense, while Frances’s arms are momentarily slack at her side before she raises her fists to eye level. Both stances suggest a kind of looseness and playfulness; the women are clearly more invested in their bodies being in motion than in anyone winning or losing. It’s difficult to discern who makes the first move; maybe they’re moving together, at the same time. And as the film unfolds, with each passing activity they share (dancing in the park, reading and crocheting, smoking on the fire escape, playing backgammon, doing laundry, falling asleep while watching a movie), Frances’s and Sophie’s distinct personalities often seem to dissolve into one.

But there’s more to Sophie than her entanglement with Frances. In addition to her paradoxical roles as foil and mirror, she’s also someone looking for a sense of self. And, in its clear-eyed specificity, Sumner’s remarkable performance gives her that: despite her brief time on-screen, the actor leaves an impression, asserting Sophie as her own character even as she establishes the ways in which Frances’s identity is predicated on their relationship. At the start of the film, the two women are living together in Brooklyn Heights, and we can already pick up on the tension within their domestic arrangement. Frances jokes, “The coffee people are right. We are like a lesbian couple that doesn’t have sex anymore,” and Sophie noncommittally agrees to be cast in this role of imaginary partner. Her life is heavily colored by Frances’s idea of her as the friend she met in college, someone Frances aspires to be. But the Sophie we see on-screen is getting ready to leave those old habits behind. She’s ready to “grow up.”

She’s changing, and she wants Frances to see that. And it’s clear from the outset that she’s capable of distinguishing herself; even in the opening montage, Sumner’s body language reveals the kind of self-control that comes with time and experience, and is informed by the expectations of how grown-ups are supposed to behave. Frances, on the other hand, is going through a rough transition into adulthood and struggling to reconcile herself to her art. While working as an apprentice at a dance company where she occasionally teaches kids, she sees her employment situation sour and her housing situation grow more and more unstable. She isn’t anywhere near becoming the famous dancer in the coffee-table books she once imagined Sophie (who, we learn near the beginning of the film, works at Random House) would be publishing. Meanwhile, Sophie is secure in her career and has a boyfriend she’s getting serious about. Where once she indulged and encouraged Frances’s outrageousness, now she’s settled into a mature role she feels obligated to embody.

In practiced responses, the verve in her voice we heard early in the film gradually dissipates into something that resembles feigned affectation. Sumner hints at the ambivalence Sophie feels about her achievement of stability. Veiling her English accent behind a simmering hum, the actor suggests that Sophie’s knowingness is a burden. Her maternal impulses, while valuable to other people, are experienced by her as a curse rather than a gift. And there’s a contradiction inherent in the path she chooses in her attempt to separate herself from Frances: though Sophie seems to have her life together, she’s also relinquished control by moving with her boyfriend to Japan and quitting her job.

For much of the film, Sumner is spectral, the memory of her rounded glasses and good posture seeming to intrude in scenes where she isn’t physically present, in moments when Frances talks about the two of them being “the same person with different hair.” (Gerwig and Baumbach’s follow-up collaboration, Mistress America, nods to this idea when Lola Kirke sees Sumner on the street and mistakes her for Gerwig.) And even after the two friends become estranged—following a disastrous meeting at a bar in which Frances comes to resent Sophie’s boyfriend, Patch, and her goofy, unrecognizable behavior around him—Sophie’s disembodied voice remains in Frances’s head. In an effort toward reconciliation, they share an awkward phone call, which Frances ends with a hurried “IloveyouSophiebye” that denies Sophie a chance to respond.

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During the stretch of the film when she’s barely on-screen at all, Sophie’s busy with her travel plans, her blog, the charmed life she’s leading, and the appearances she’s keeping up. But she unravels when we see her back at the friends’ alma mater, Vassar. They bump into each other at a charity auction, and in a variation on Sophie and Frances’s fight at the bar, Sophie and Patch start to argue. Sumner’s body language, which up to now has been defined by rigidity and restraint, gets back some of its looseness. Sophie launches herself at Patch as she bellows, “Your grandpa was a cheating Nazi!” When Sumner plays drunk, she lets her body go, as if channeling the freedom that Sophie finds desirable in Frances.

By the end of the film, Sophie and Frances have awkwardly stumbled back into their friendship. The mirror imagery returns when Sophie, drunk, finds comfort lying next to Frances in bed. Sumner’s voice crackles, more naked in this moment than it’s been throughout the movie. In the dark, Sophie looks Frances in the eyes and says, “I’ve always felt so competitive with you.” But even as the two are entwined again, Sumner reveals Sophie’s autonomy with a clarity the character has never had before: She delivers her lines, craggy in their honesty, as though they were from an unedited draft. With newfound intimacy and assertiveness, she articulates Sophie to Frances. When the lights are out, you can still see the glint of light in Sumner’s eyes, as though she were finally figuring out who her character should be. Sophie’s change has occurred within an ellipsis—we’ve seen her in just a scene here and a scene there, her evolution discernible only in staccato bursts. That evolution is laid bare here, and her shifting gaze from Frances to the ceiling to the stars beyond is enough to convey how she’s no longer just standing in the wind.

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Kyle Turner is a queer freelance writer based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a contributor to Paste, and his writing on film and culture has been featured in the Village Voice, GQ, Slate, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times.

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