Female friendship and coming of age in ‘Fleabag’ and ‘Frances Ha’
The last decade has seen a growing number of boundary-pushing female protagonists in shows like Broad City, Insecure and Shrill. A newer archetype gaining steam is the messy millennial stuck between growing up and clinging to the freedom of adolescence — the limbo between college and the rest of your life.
A constant throughout these stories is the mood of uncertainty for their characters. This episodic chronicling of life’s sequential flow is ideally suited to syndication, giving visual representation to the meandering rhythm that becomes amplified when you’re stuck between staying a kid and becoming a grownup. After all, there’s no expiration date on coming of age.
Crucial to these stories is the power and necessity of female friendship when negotiating the path between girlhood and womanhood. Platonic connections have nudged romance aside as more people opt out of the traditional marriage. In Noah Baumbach’s 2012 film Frances Ha and the series Fleabag, the protagonist becomes helpless without her best friend, losing her bearings as her other half pulls ahead or gets ripped from her side.
Throughout Frances Ha, Frances and Sophie are described as “the same person with different hair,” a connection formed during their years at Vassar College that flourishes as they try to survive the bustling, bleak microcosm of New York City. Sophie finds professional and personal success while Frances makes the most of a dance apprenticeship and copes with being “undateable.”
As Sophie moves forward, Frances tries to put on a good face but feels blindsided by her friend’s sudden move up the social ladder. Frances thinks her main concern is her friend giving up her independence, but in reality, she is worried their friendship will be given up as well.
Greta Gerwig’s Frances dances through her story with an endearing clumsiness, barging into people’s lives as she avoids her own troubles whereas Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag is realistically raunchy and often faces conflict with nothing more than a quiver of clever quips.
Her loss is much more permanent than Frances’s, the death of her friend Boo tied to the selfish actions of Fleabag herself. One tragic choice cost her the most important female connection after her mother died, creating a hole within Fleabag she spends the first season trying to fill with whatever self-destructive tendency she fancies that week.
As she starts to reconnect with her sister and fix her life, the memories of Boo begin to haunt Fleabag. These scenes show how integral the friendship was to her sanity, grounding her in troubled times. Without Boo, Fleabag begins to lose her footing until she must face the mistakes she made once more, spending most of the season pushing the memories away before slowly facing them at last.
“People are all we’ve got,” guest star Kristin Scott Thomas tells Fleabag in a Season Two bar scene. While she cannot replace Boo, she uses her memories to improve herself and work on her relationship with her sister Claire, played in brilliant counterpoint by Sian Clifford. Throughout the season, the two grow close once more and eventually admit they care for one another. “The only person I'd run through an airport for is you,” Claire whispers to Fleabag in the finale, the two sharing a meaningful look acknowledging the immense growth in both characters.
Both Frances Ha and Fleabag mix moods expertly, pairing tenderness and wit, sweetness and savagery to allow their characters realistic growth. The use of dark humor and the confidence of the actors allows these women the chance to express their unlikeable selves in the safe space that friendship created. The dependence on a friend is almost universal and worrying they will outgrow or leave you is a terrifying fear rarely acknowledged in fiction and in life. Yet the bumps that come along with it allow both protagonists to come of age as they begin to balance each part of themselves.