AMERICAN DRIFTER (FRANCES HA)

In the last year, there's been a bit of pop culture debate about the emergence of the "woman child".

Like the "man child", the "woman child" is purported to be someone who is normally in their late 20s or early 30s but still living out their teenage years.

The phenomenon of the "woman child" was fuelled last September by an article for the website Jezebel by Deborah Schoeneman, one of the writers of the acclaimed HBO comedy 'Girls', who observed that a generation of single women "seem to be acting and dressing like girls more than ever".

"Woman children", she claimed, prolong their girlhood by prioritising their friendship with other "women children" over relationships with men.

They act as if they are still part of a high school clique, while some of their peers embrace motherhood or careers.

They post up on Facebook pictures of their holidays or boozy nights out with the girls while peers who have taken on more adult responsibilities post up photos of their weddings and their children.

They defer marriage until later than the national average and they also defer motherhood, with the help of scientific developments like egg freezing. 

Schoeneman argued the "woman child" is less likely to be competitive and more about collaborating with female friends to help start businesses, meet guys and pick out a cute outfit.

Their icons, she claimed, are celebrities like Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj and Zooey Deschanel and they would rather go along to see 'The Hunger Games' in cinemas with fellow "woman children" than 'What To Expect When You Are Expecting'.

In a key section of the Jezebel article, she opined: "Maybe "women-children" are afraid of becoming grown-ups in an increasingly scary world of layoffs, rich Republicans and insane weather patterns. 

"Or maybe they have better survival skills. "Women-children" certainly seem to be enjoying themselves more than their peers who struggle with the motherhood/career conundrum. 

"The trend has crept into my peer group, too. It's as if some of the women around me still want to be girls because girls just want to have fun. Girls certainly don't obsess over a feminist article in The Atlantic or the dearth of female directors in Hollywood."

Schoeneman's "Women Child" theory has sparked intense debate, with Jess May Aloe countering on the Feminspire website that the article represented an appalling value judgment that only women with careers, marriages or families were adults.

Rejecting the notion that in order to be defined as an adult woman, a woman had to care about having kids or having a career, Aloe angrily quoted fellow Feminspire writer, Taylor Blakin that "being pregnant, married or having fancy dinner parties isn't a measure of your value as an individual (and, in this economy, neither is having a steady job anymore)".

"My expression of my femininity (or what you like to call 'childishness') or nostalgia for my past..doesn't mean I am incapable of maturity and embracing motherhood. Lack of babies, non-impending marriage or unemployment do not separate a person from becoming an adult and remaining a child.

"The second you start parsing out what type of women are more valuable than others, you become a misogynist."

Independent director Noah Baumbach's new film 'Frances Ha' may fuel further debate on the existence, or otherwise, of the "woman child".

Greta Gerwig stars as Frances, a struggling dancer living in New York, who at the start of the film is so engrossed in her friendship with her flatmate Sophie (played by Sting's daughter, Mickey Sumner) that she spurns a request by her boyfriend that they live together.

Frances and Sophie's friendship is so intense, they share a bed together and joke that they are like a lesbian couple who do not have sex anymore.

The two friends certainly, at times, behave like teenagers. In the opening sequence, they engage in a playful fight, pushing and slapping each other in a park. Frances, during the break up with her boyfriend, even adopts a different voice when Sophie interrupts their conversation with a phone call.

However Frances is hit for six when Sophie suddenly announces she is moving out of their apartment to her dream Manhattan condo in TriBeCa.

Sophie soon gets a publishing job and a boyfriend. Frances, meanwhile, drifts aimlessly for much of the film. 

She moves in for a while with two young bohemian artists, Lev (Adam Driver from 'Girls') and Dan (Michael Esper) before heading to Sacramento for Christmas with her parents and then cadges a few weeks in a New York apartment with a member of her dance troupe Rachel (Grace Gummer) who reluctantly helps her out. 

Baumbach and Gerwig's heroine spends two hopelessly shambolic days in Paris and returns to her old college town to work as waitress and residential assistant at a dance camp.

As she floats around in search of a meaningful life, Frances does so in a constant state of bewilderment and disappointment - unable to cope with Sophie's increasingly serious relationship with Patch (Patrick Heusinger) who eventually becomes her friend's fiancé and relocates her to Tokyo.

The relationship between Frances and Sophie has slightly creepy undertones that could easily veer off into the territory explored by Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh in Barbet Schroeder's 1992 thriller 'Single White Female'.

But it never really goes there because this is a typically, rambling tragi-comedy by Noah Baumbach who gave us the quirky comic dramas 'The Squid and the Whale' about a family coping with divorce in Brooklyn, 'Margot At The Wedding' about sibling tensions with Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh and 'Greenberg' with Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig and Rhys Ifans about a house sitter recovering from a nervous breakdown.

Handsomely shot in black and white by Sam Levy from a script by Gerwig and Baumbach, it is easy to detect the influence of Woody Allen in the movie - 'Manhattan' obviously springs to mind, although Frances is also reminiscent of Diane Keaton in 'Annie Hall'.

There is also a nod to the movies of Francois Truffaut and the French New Wave - for a moment Lev and Dan threaten to be the New York equivalent of 'Jules and Jim', there is a passing reference to Jean Luc Godard and Truffaut's muse Jean Pierre Leaud, there is the obligatory cafe culture scene in Paris, it has the freewheeling cinematic style of The Nouvelle Vague and the same celebration of youth.

And yet, for all these pluses, 'Frances Ha' is hard work.

You really want to shake Gerwig's character as she stumbles around New York and while Baumbach's film reaches for Woody Allen in tone, the screenplay never quite delivers those killer lines and laugh out loud moments that characterise Allen movies at their best.

If anything, it feels more like Allen's second division movies - 'Anything Else', 'Melinda and Melinda', 'Whatever Works' etc. - working hard to wring out only a handful of laughs.

As for the performances, Gerwig does well in the main role - carrying the entire movie on her shoulders.

Sumner, Driver and Esper also make a decent impression in their supporting roles.

'Frances Ha' is watchable but, like its heroine, it frustrates the viewer as it drifts about aimlessly in search of some meaning.

When it finally does get there in the charming climax, it does so effectively.

It is hard to escape the feeling that Frances will be viewed as a poster child by advocates of the woman child theory.

In reality, however, she is no different from a male drifter - a little lost but searching for a meaningful role in her adult life.

('Frances Ha' is screening at the Queen's Film Theatre Belfast and was released in other UK and Irish cinemas on July 26, 2013. This review originally appeared on Eamonnmallie.com)