The titular
damsels of writer/director Whit Stillman’s new movie, his first in 14 years,
are in each pretty, preppy, poised and alert to the world in their highly
selective way. Each are named after flowers, each are odour-sensitive, each
strives to use their ostensibly superior ethical, intellectual and interactive
skills to fortify the quality of student life at Seven Oaks College. Their
tactics include suicide prevention through tap-dancing (the handmade poster on wall
of the suicide prevention center reads COME ON, IT’S NOT THAT BAD!) and going out with boys who are neither
handsome, nor charming, nor smart. (One of them is so dumb he doesn’t even know
his colours.) By rewarding the male doofi (that’s plural for doofus) of Seven
Oaks with their companionship, these damsels feel they can usher these doofi
from the life of aimless idiocy to which they seem surely destined to a more
enlightened and socially meaningful place. Of course, dating doofi also
prevents the damsels from experiencing such annoying unpleasantries as
heartbreak.
Herein lays the very special comic tone that Stillman
aspires to and frequently apprehends in Damsels
in Distress: whether or not his characters are actually from privilege they
each work arduously to cultivate both the airs and the sense of altruistic
vocation they associate with privilege, and such airs and ambitions constitute
both the damsels’ folly and their persistent charisma. Most are
well-intentioned emotional cowards, but Stillman knows that there’s more to be
gained from sympathizing with them and their quixotic pretentions than looking
down his nose at them. You might have hated these damsels from a distance when
you went to school with them, but viewed through Stillman’s generous, stylized,
idiosyncratic gaze, they become people you want to spend more time with.
Perhaps idiosyncratic is putting things too mildly.
The movie’s chief damsel, Violet, is always, even in casual conversation,
speaking lines like, “Must we tether ourselves from comment because we
ourselves are human too?” She sounds out each word carefully, ensures that each
sentence is complete, and doing so bears little resemblance to the sorts of
characters found in virtually any contemporary American youth comedy.
Fortunately she’s played by Greta Gerwig, the actress (and occasional writer
and director) probably most closely associated with such (if you’ll excuse my use
of this very stupid genre title) “mumblecore” movies as Hannah Takes the Stairs, Baghead
and House of the Devil. Gerwig’s
definitely not mumbling here. In fact, I’d go so far as to suggest that in
Gerwig Stillman’s found his ideal actor, one who intuits the cadences of his
anachronistic comic style and embodies the delicate imbalance of his quirky,
sometimes fabulous character conceits.
Which isn’t to say that everything in Damsels flies. The meandering quality of
the narrative eventually catches up with itself, and a closing musical sequence
is neither awkward enough nor elegant enough to keep from falling flat. But it
does have the funniest suicide attempt I think I’ve seen in a movie, its use of
motel-issue soap as an agent of soul-healing is hilariously absurd, and, more
importantly, its central characters are never given anything less than a slew
of contradictions, conflicting desires and other compelling complications. They
are, to be sure, comic constructs, but they also resonate with lived
experience, which is what good comedy is all about.
