Four girls at an Ivy League college attempt to teach their male peers some manners in Whit Stillman's urbane comedy
During the golden days of Hollywood's big studio system, directors such as Michael Curtiz and John Ford made three or four films a year, hoping that perhaps every couple of years a Stagecoach or a Casablanca would survive. Over the past 40-odd years, however, few film-makers have had the opportunity to develop such large bodies of work, and some have come to owe a good part of their mystique to the very paucity of their oeuvre.
The most obvious examples are Terrence Malick (70 next year) and Whit Stillman (60). Either through bad luck or excessive fastidiousness, they have respectively made five films in 40 years and four films in 20 years. The lengthy gaps in between have created expectations that are hard to fulfil, and admirers have been inclined to overestimate their achievement.
Last May, Malick's The Tree of Life divided reviewers and caused a lot of critical heart-searching when shown at Cannes. Later that summer, Damsels in Distress, Stillman's first film in 13 years, did something similar at Venice. Both directors are Harvard graduates and intellectuals of sorts, though Malick works with sizable budgets and major stars, while Stillman's movies are relatively cheap by current standards and have few readily recognisable performers. Malick's pictures tend to be set at some distance, historically or geographically, from larger urban areas, while Stillman's are rooted in cities and complex social orders.
Stillman regards his first three pictures – Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994) and The Last Days of Disco (1998) – as an informal trilogy, observing with wit and sympathy the lives of what one character in Metropolitan called the UHB – the "urban haute bourgeoisie". This is a world the director knows well. His full name, John Whitney Stillman, has an authentically patrician New England ring to it; his father had a minor position in President Kennedy's administration; his mother came from a well-established Philadelphia family; and his godfather, the sociologist E Digby Baltzell, is the author of The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America, the 1964 book that helped popularise the term Wasp.
Metropolitan centres on a group of wealthy preppies in Manhattan who spend the Christmas vacation together socialising in evening dress and who see themselves as the last examples of Fitzgerald's "beautiful and damned". Barcelona, set in Spain in the early 1980s between the death of Franco and the end of the cold war, is a Jamesian comedy of international manners involving a young businessman and his US navy officer cousin. The Last Days of Disco is about a group of brittle, treacherous, fashion-conscious friends, educated at prestigious New England schools and sticking together in New York, working in publishing and the traditional professions and spending their evenings at exclusive discos.
The times and settings of the trilogy are very specific. Those of Damsels in Distress are rather vague and its style altogether less formal. On the face of it, this is a campus comedy of a traditional sort in which three attractive young women recruit a newcomer to their superior group at the fictitious Seven Oaks college, a minor branch of the Ivy League. The confident leader is Violet (Greta Gerwig, a familiar figure in the so-called "mumblecore" school of garrulous independent film-making); her followers are the decisive African-American Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke), who affects to come from London, and the southern belle Heather (Carrie MacLemore). The newcomer is the sensible, conventional Lily (Analeigh Tipton), who both participates and criticises.
The girls fall out over boyfriends and intrigue together in conventional ways. But their proselytising activities are altogether benign. Their aim is to improve the hearts, bodies and minds of their contemporaries on a campus where the crude antics of fraternity boys (whose houses are named with Latin rather than Greek letters) dictate the prevailing tone. This highly literary film resembles a version of Animal House rewritten by a follower of Jane Austen.
As dictated by Violet, the girls' unorthodox and extremely amusing method of civilising the university involves running a suicide prevention centre where dancing is the chief form of therapy, attracting boyfriends who are less cool and intelligent than themselves and thus in need of reformation, and handing out soap to the unhygienic male students. Violet believes that musical crazes (whether Strauss waltzes or Chubby Checker's twist) can transform the world. At the end she invents a new dance, the sambola.
This crusade takes place against a background that is a mixture of styles and issues from overlapping eras of the past half-century. This period has seen a campaign against fraternities and their triumphant revival, as well as a rebellion against traditional standards and a counter-revolution that created political correctness. Though never fully focused or explicit, Damsels in Distress seems to be a metaphor for a society that has constantly been in need of authority and responsible leadership, and where since frontier days women have seen it as their duty to set standards and improve rebellious males.
There is a good deal of whimsy here mixed with the wit, and the deadly seriousness of the students leads to everything being taken to extremes. But in changing their names and trying on masks, they're shaping their identities rather than striking poses. And the right place to conduct these experiments is on the Seven Oaks campus (actually a remarkable 19th-century institution for retired seamen on Staten Island), with its Greek revival buildings and other attempts to evoke some ancient grandeur. One of the male characters attends a course on flit lit (flit in the American meaning of gay or camp), devoted to the poised humour of Peacock, Wilde, Firbank and Waugh, and is writing a paper on "The Decline of Decadence". In another era he might have been homosexual, he says. "Now, I just don't see the point."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/apr/29/damsels-in-distress-review
Aleksandr Dovzhenko Aleksandr Sokurov Aleksei Balabanov Alektra Blue
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