Jenny Slate: Frances

The Sunlit Night

Frances

[displayed on screen: Piet Mondrian's Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow '1930']
Frances: [narrating the architecture of the family apartment] My family's apartment looks like a Mondrian of claustrophobia. My parents' sofa bed is the red rectangle, my sister and my old bunk beds are the blue rectangle, and the fire escape is the yellow, which is the only rectangle where anybody can breathe.

Frances: [reviewing the apprenticeship assignment] Nils' project was essentially a giant color-by-numbers. It was a coloring book and I, of course, was always more of a finger painter. So this would be Nils' work and Nils' battle, not mine. Fine, I can be a soldier.

[Nils and Frances share a bottle of wine as they sit on the dunes above the fjord]
Nils: You know, you and I are opposites, Frances. I'm not used to people. Especially not teaching, but you know, we complement one another. My orange to your blue.
Nils: [takes a drink and continues] Blue and orange are complementary colors. If you look at something orange, a piece of paper for like 15 seconds and then look at a white paper, your eye makes blue. It's the same with yellow and violet. I use yellow and red when I want violet, you know? So it is living.
[waves crashing]
Frances: It is living.
[both lightly chuckle]

[Nils observes Frances meticulously marking using a framing square]
Nils: Your eye is sharpening.
Frances: [internal monologue] I started to understand that the barn was not paint by numbers but that it was a whole geometry. We were using the minor angles of sundials and the unit grids of graphing to build a kind of monochrome mosaic. And it was also my monument to my detention to this place that made work feel worth doing.
Nils: Have you been able to do your own work?
Frances: Uh... trying to, a little bit.
Nils: I'd like to see some of your pieces. After the inspection tomorrow. Tonight, I have to complete the paperwork. You finish up for the inspection.
Frances: [incredulously] Are you kidding?
Nils: Like my mother, I'm never kidding.

Frances: Nils had disappeared into total silence, but one day, an envelope arrived, full of foreign postage stamps.
Frances: [opens envelope to reveal a map of North Norway Art Highlights] We passed. I thought I'd ruined everything. But maybe it was never really that fragile.