The trouble is, I agree with Fran: to me, this line in the script sounded self-referential. (My thoughts about this film are based on one viewing at the cinema and reading the reviews afterwards.)
Moreover, what is treated as progress in the film – on reflection, Fran finds some things she could like about the unspecified movie – seems to me more like being browbeaten into submission.
There’s a brief exterior shot of the cinema Fran and Richard visit, with what may be two film titles displayed- if there was an in joke, I wasn’t quick enough to get it.
Michael O’Sullivan, Washington Post, Jan. 30, 2024: “Fran (Daisy Ridley), (is) the reclusive oddball among a handful of more gregarious but no less idiosyncratic co-workers in the Dunder Mifflin-like office of a Pacific Northwest port authority.”
Alissa Wilkinson reviewed the film in the New York Times of Jan. 25, 2024:
“ “Sometimes I Think About Dying,” directed by Rachel Lambert (former theatre costume designer turned writer and director), comes by its theatricality naturally; it’s based, in part, on the play “Killers” by Kevin Armento. (The other credited writers are Stefanie Abel Horowitz and Katy Wright-Mead, the latter of which whose credits include “Boardwalk Empire” and “The Knick.”) The play entwined the tale of a young woman who thinks about dying with a secondary story about a young woman obsessed with killing, and though I haven’t seen it, I assume that means its themes were very different.”
Deborah Ross wrote in The Spectator of 20th April:
“Fran thinks about dying, but not gruesomely. Her mental tableaux of death look as if they were staged by the artist Gregory Crewdson. Sometimes her body is draped dramatically over driftwood on a serene beach or posed in a foggy forest on a soft green bed of moss. She imagines standing alone in a nondescript finished office basement as a giant snake slithers by. She imagines death, essentially, as peace in the midst of ever-changing nature.”
“In classical Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the death drive (German: Todestrieb) is the drive toward death and destruction, often expressed through behaviors such as aggression, repetition compulsion, and self-destructiveness. The death drive opposes Eros, the tendency toward survival, propagation, sex, and other creative, life-producing drives.” (Wikipedia)
As Wendy Ide writes in The Guardian, Fran sports an “almost aggressively inconspicuous wardrobe”.
Stephanie Ornelas posted at sundance.org on January 20, 2023:
“Rachel Lambert explains how important it is that the film doesn’t feel patronizing. “It felt earned. Because it’s sort of celebrating the minutia of being alive — the things we touch, the people we see, the things we eat, the things that we stand and wait to brew. And it sort of bathed in that. Fran found her salvation in ultimately merging that place in her head and the world around her.”
That full stop after “earned” only emphasises the weakness of the “Because” that follows. For me, the film is essentially patronising. It does some of what the US version of The Office does, or Parks and Recreation, but without the wit, charm, or conviction. Worryingly, there’s an implication that Fran should let Robert into her life because, well, beggars can’t be choosers. When the film finds them they are on the way to rendering themselves “unlikeable”, cinema’s term for TV’s “undateable”.
I dozed briefly and missed the scene where Fran goes to Robert’s for homemade spaghetti. I hope the sauce was full of complex flavour, though I somehow doubt it.
Alissa Wilkinson: “Perhaps the best term for Fran’s persistent mood is acedia, that feeling of not caring much about anything, especially one’s position in the world. (Ancient monks called it the “noonday demon.”) It’s often equated with depression, but there’s a particular torpor provoked by a soul-sucking office that can bring it on. Many a new college graduate has discovered, quickly, that a 9-to-5 job can become unbearable even if the work itself is simple, pleasant and well-paid. Something about the prospect of everlasting sameness can sap the will to live…
…A small group of people…spend most of their time on crushingly banal chatter. Why is this cruise ship docked in such a way that it blocks the views of the mountains?..”
(Do I hear a script editor sniggering, “These people could be looking right at the vehicle for change, and still only whine that it interfered with their worldview.”?)
Towards the end of the film, a recently retired member of the office faithful is discovered having a lonely breakfast at a café near the office. The cruise for which she and her husband diligently saved all their working lives has been cancelled by ill health.
The film was mainly shot in the city of Astoria, Oregon, which lies across the Columbia River from Cape Disappointment. I began to wonder if Fran could take a Greyhound in the other direction. She might offer her spreadsheet skills in Portland or Seattle, where the opportunities for career development are surely greater. (I’ve checked now: she could be in Portland in three hours, and Seattle in a further four.) When Robert sees Fran home, she confesses that she inhabits just the ground floor of the building; more cause for comment in Astoria than in London, one supposes. Her flat has a pristine carpet, and the décor suggests that Fran may have inherited it from a grandmother; perhaps that’s what ties her to this town.
I prefer to think that Fran has a fundamentally “grounded” personality, rather than being “run aground”, say.
Reviewers have noted that Fran’s home diet is oddly characterised by cottage cheese and red wine. Be that as it may, this film offered about as much nourishment as the glazed donuts which finally buy Fran popularity in the office.
leaving is not enough; you must
stay gone. train your heart
like a dog. change the locks
even on the house he’s never
visited. you lucky, lucky girl.
you have an apartment
just your size. a bathtub
full of tea. a heart the size
of Arizona, but not nearly
so arid. don’t wish away
your cracked past, your
crooked toes, your problems
are papier mache puppets
you made or bought because the vendor
at the market was so compelling you just
had to have them. you had to have him.
and you did. and now you pull down
the bridge between your houses,
you make him call before
he visits, you take a lover
for granted, you take
a lover who looks at you
like maybe you are magic. make
the first bottle you consume
in this place a relic. place it
on whatever altar you fashion
with a knife and five cranberries.
don’t lose too much weight.
stupid girls are always trying
to disappear as revenge. and you
are not stupid. you loved a man
with more hands than a parade
of beggars, and here you stand. heart
like a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas.
heart leaking something so strong
they can smell it in the street.”
― “FRIDA KAHLO TO MARTY MCCONNELL”, by Marty McConnell
Julia Upton 