Whit Stillman (2011)

This is the first film I’ve seen by the writer-director Whit Stillman (it’s the first he’s made since 1998).  The setting – Seven Oaks College on the American East Coast – is a world of its own:  archly artificial at first, it comes to acquire its own skewed reality and validity.  The damsels of the title are exceedingly feminine – especially Violet Wister (not her real name), the driving force behind a campaign to bring hope to suicidal students at Seven Oaks and improved hygiene to male ones.   Her companions, who have similarly fragrant names and values, are Heather, Rose and a novitiate, Lily.  The conceit is executed by Stillman with such facility that the film drags a bit sometimes but the eccentricity is well worked out and worked through – the fact that the whole thing is so mildly entertaining almost increases its charm.  It’s a slight drawback that the boys on campus are not only relatively uncomplicated and prone to boorishness but also dull, compared with the girls (not that there seem to be many girls around the place – just the main quartet and a couple of others).  That problem is solved by two off-campus characters – Xavier, who espouses Cathar beliefs largely to justify the way he wants to have sex with Lily, and Charlie, who claims to have paid employment in ‘strategic development’ but turns out to be someone smart and sophisticated enough to pair off with Violet.

Most of the young cast – though none of the girls is quite as young as she should be – are as likeable as they’re talented.  As the super-educated, flawlessly articulate Violet, Greta Gerwig is outstanding: she has real warmth as well as beautifully controlled wit.  Analeigh Tipton as Lily suggests very well someone who’s increasingly part of the magic circle but also keeps her brain functioning in a less rarefied universe.  Carrie McLemore as Heather is amusing in her attempts to keep faith with the damsels’ philosophy, while enjoying a relationship with a not very bright frat boy called Thor (Billy Magnussen), who can’t distinguish between colours.  Megalyn Echikunwoke (Rose) is lovely to look at but by some way the weakest link.  It may not be all her fault:  her character seems to have more lines that are closer to punchlines than the others (Stillman’s approach is mostly too refined to stoop to anything so vulgar as a punchline).   Even so, Echikunwoke gives off an awareness that she knows the writing’s funny – and that makes her less funny than anyone else.  Adam Brody (Charlie) and Hugo Becker (Xavier) are both excellent – Becker’s apparently deadly serious Cathar spiel is one of the best things in the film.

The damsels, Violet especially, suggest distant relatives of Thora Birch’s Enid in Ghost World – not least in Stillman’s implying that their clique may be designed partly to hold adulthood at bay.  The costumes, the sugar almond colours of their world as lit by Doug Emmett, and the nostalgic (late 1950s) flavour of Mark Suozzo’s score are a very agreeable combination but they also contribute to this implication.  Violet believes one of the two most potent antidotes to suicidal tendencies is ‘to invent a new international dance craze’.   Damsels in Distress ends with the cast dancing the one she’s invented – the sambola – to a Gershwin song called ‘Things Are Looking Up’, which Fred Astaire sang in the 1937 musical A Damsel in Distress (in which he starred with Joan Fontaine).  Not surprisingly, the second antidote is cosmetic.  Herself feeling down after she finds her sort-of boyfriend Frank (Ryan Metcalf) has been unfaithful to her, Violet leaves the campus and books into a cheap motel for the night.  The motel soap gives her renewed hope and she delivers to some of the staff there – men as well as women – a quiet paean to its restorative scent.  Their reactions suggest that her passion is infectious and Seven Oaks College perhaps not so hermetically sealed after all.

13 May 2012