— Gendered Romantic Scripts and Alternative Intimacy
（HQ5010 Introduction to Gender&Diversity - Close Reading 700 words）

In the film Frances Ha, the protagonist is called “undateable”. This label implies a personal deficiency, as if Frances lacks some essential quality that would make her a viable romantic partner. Yet the film denies this interpretation:
Frances’s “undateability” is not an inherent flaw but a socially constructed category, produced through the gap between gendered social expectations and her actual behavior. Externally, she fails to perform the conventional scripts of heterosexual romance. Internally, her deepest intimacy flows toward friendship rather than romantic partnership.
Through Frances’s embarrassing encounters with men, the film challenges the assumption that all women naturally crave traditional romantic relationships, opening up space for intimacy to exist in alternative forms.

Frances is marked as “undateable” because she cannot execute the social performance that dating requires. This becomes most apparent in her dinner with Lev. The scene is made up of a series of small failures that eventually pile up into a portrait of someone who is romantically incompetent.
When she insists on paying, Lev jokes, “Fine, just because you bought dinner doesn’t mean I’m going to sleep with you.” Frances’s smile freezes. She answers awkwardly that she was not trying to. Then Lev quickly explains he was “pretending to be a liberated woman.” The little joke falls flat. The atmosphere stiffens. It’s clear that Frances cannot manage the rhythm and tone of dating banter.

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These failures reveal that “undateability” has nothing to do with whether Frances is attractive or interested. The problem is that she cannot perform a script she either does not understand or does not want to follow. The label emerges from the distance between what romantic interaction “should” look like and what Frances actually does.

Frances’s “undateability” also has an internal dimension. Her deepest connection isn’t with men but with her best friend Sophie. Frances is stiff with men. She always says the wrong words and her body betrays her. But with Sophie, she is completely at ease. Laying tangled together in bed, Frances describes them as “like a lesbian couple that doesn't have sex anymore.” The physical closeness failed with Lev becomes natural here.

At a dinner party in Sacramento, after a humiliating chaos, Frances articulates her vision of love. She describes wanting to catch someone’s eye across a room, “but not because you’re possessive, or it’s precisely sexual, but because that is your person in this life.” Through negation, she defines intimacy: it’s about recognizing each other.
The tenderness of these moments reveals that Frances is entirely capable of deep connection and love. Her ideal simply cannot fit inside the framework of “dateability” because it was never shaped that way to begin with.

The film remains deliberately vague about whether Frances “cannot” or “will not” participate in conventional romantic relationships. She seems to both crash into the rules and bypass them. This vagueness is generous. Frances is neither a tragic figure who fails at love nor a hero who refuses it. She is simply someone whose intimacy takes a different shape.

The film’s final frame shows her standing alone before her new apartment mailbox, smiling at her nameplate which has been shortened to “Frances Ha” because it couldn’t fit the label.

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