Greta Gerwig’s solo directorial debut with ‘Lady Bird’

In Mistress America, Brooke is betrayed by every friend and lover she has (or imagines she does). Though one is a teenager and the other an adult, both face similar challenges, the same ones we all face: Who am I and how do I get there? Only she’s not 24 anymore. Tracy is a writer, and she gradually finds her voice by secretly cribbing story and character details from her future stepsister’s aspirations and foibles.

The film follows lonely college freshman Tracy (played by Lola Kirke), who feels isolated on campus and is desperate for companionship.

When Greta Gerwig co-starred in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg five years ago, co-written by Baumbach’s then-wife Jennifer Jason Leigh, little would they know that it would be the start of a creative collaboration that would extend to two more movies. “People could feel her failure coming”, she writes of Brooke, whose restaurant deal is imperiled when her investor boyfriend dumps her. Her life is glamorous not only because of its accoutrements (silk blouses, her own apartment, ubiquitous glasses of wine) but in the way she appears to be moving through it all easily and grace, hitting all the high marks and experiencing none of the lows. Mainly because Tracey herself is having such a rubbish time at university. Her roommate hates her, she missed out on a place in an illustrious literary society and her crush is unavailable. Nobody was going to make any money, anyway. “I think had I been more successful by changing myself… but luckily, I had no choice but to be authentic”. Everyone is infected with the FOMO’. We are plenty used to bromances, but women bonding with other women is unsual enough that over 40 percent of films in 2014 failed the Bechdel Test. Mistress America joins a spate of recent female friendships in film and TV that have helped reverse the tide: Abbi and Ilana in Broad City, Ann and Leslie on Parks and Rec, Taystee and Poussey on Orange is the New Black, and Maggie and Emma on Playing House. I mean, definitely as a kid of course I thought that anyone who had ever been mean to me would hate themselves once they saw how wonderful I was-and once I was on a billboard for a nonexistent perfume. There are some film-makers I love and yet I can not watch their movies. I mean so much of that is dictated to us by f***ing stupid magazines anyways.

“I’ve done my fair share of looking the way people want me to look”.

You have to really be committed to be in this movie and that was something that was made very clear to me at the beginning.

At work? With your gran?