There’s a simple, striking scene at the very start of Saint Frances — a small, quiet movie that offers more authenticity in brief moments than most feature-length movies manage as a whole.
Bridget (played by Kelly O’Sullivan, who also wrote the script), a girl-next-door type, wakes up after what she presumes is a one-night stand to find a pool of darkened blood at the center of the bed. It’s also smeared on her lover’s cheek, and there’s a bloody handprint on hers. This isn’t a crime scene, but a very realistic love scene.
In real life, women get their periods. They can show up at particularly inopportune moments like these. They are also not a big deal, and Saint Frances treats them as such. Jace (Max Lipchitz) — a kind man who is eight years younger than Bridget, and whom she settled for at the end of a bad party — smiles. It’s no sweat. He’ll wash the sheets, he had a great time, and he couldn’t even tell when he went down on her. She smiles back. It’s a little moment, but it’s the kind of moment that cinema at large tends to veer away from. Menstruation is rarely sexy, and yet, somehow, it is here.
The majority of Saint Frances moves in this way, largely thanks to Bridget, a stunted 34-year-old who doesn’t know what she wants in a career, in a man, in life in general. She’s blunt and honest, but she’s also endearing in a Hannah Horvath kind of way. We watch as she fumbles her way through unprotected sex, as she chooses to get an abortion, as she downplays her body’s signals that she may not be well, as she sleeps with a man who continuously finds subtle ways of blaming her for why he can’t seem to keep it up.
It’s all very textbook and authentic in a way that made me, a 30-year-old woman lost in a lot of areas in her life, feel validated.
In the big picture, as a coming-of-age story, Saint Frances has been told many times over. But in its more specific strokes, it depicts uglier and messier and bleaker moments — the ones that need to be shown from a woman’s perspective so they can be normalized, rather than ending up the butt of gross-out jokes.
But there’s another female perspective here that helps illustrate Bridget’s growth. Bridget gets a gig nannying the titular Frances, a 10-year-old who’s not easy. She’s one of those kids who tends to say whatever pops into her head, often in public, which is only made worse by the fact that she’s smarter than most children her age. Of course, the precocious child with wisdom beyond her years is a well-trodden trope. In recent years, it’s become less cute and more cloying — as precocious and particularly smart children so often are in real life. (The screen adds 10 layers of adorability.)
Fortunately, this isn’t the whole story. Frances doesn’t change the trajectory of Bridget’s life, but caring for a living being and getting invited into her mothers’ lives certainly makes an impact. Bridget is with them when they need help raising their children, and when they try to navigate their postpartum depression. They are with Bridget when she has a health scare and when she feels suffocated by the need to find success in a way the world (and her parents) can understand.
Certainly, there’s plenty that could weigh Saint Frances down — abortion and menstruation talk and a lesbian couple struggling to keep it together and a few scenes we’ve seen before (including one involving breast-feeding in a public park). But thanks to a light script, a natural cast and breezy direction by O’Sullivan’s partner Alex Thompson, none of it feels contrived. Saint Frances explores the ways in which women at all stages of life present one face to the world while hiding another — because it’s what we’ve been taught, and it’s what often comes easiest. Here, we see women finally becoming comfortable with revealing their true faces.
In that way, Saint Frances resembles the very specific sensation of removing one’s bra at the end of the day — sweet relief.
