Damsels in Distress

Whit Stillman’s scin­til­lat­ing 1990 debut fea­ture, Met­ro­pol­i­tan, offered a raff­ish, insider’s eye on the Long Island débu­tante ball scene. It ador­ing­ly observed how a throng of over­priv­i­leged, overe­d­u­cat­ed and over­dressed fops cau­tious­ly fell in love with one another.

In one spe­cial scene, Still­man alter ego Tay­lor Nichols airs his dis­ap­point­ment at hav­ing just viewed Buñuel’s The Dis­creet Charm of the Bour­geoisie: ​“When I heard that title,” he says, ​“I thought final­ly some­one is going to tell the truth about the bour­geoisie.” Over the course of four fea­tures, Still­man remains cinema’s staunchest defend­er of chat­ter­ing class whimsicality.

Fol­low­ing a 13-year silence since his pre­vi­ous work, The Last Days of Dis­co, Still­man returns tri­umphant­ly with Damsels in Dis­tress, a rain­bow-hued high-school movie quite unlike any oth­er. Mak­ing quite a habit of steal­ing every film she appears in, mum­blecore empress Gre­ta Ger­wig daz­zles as charm­ing nar­cis­sist Vio­let, the head super­vi­sor at a sui­cide pre­ven­tion cen­tre on the cam­pus of fic­tion­al East Coast col­lege, Sev­en Oaks.

When a new girl, Lily (Analeigh Tip­ton), arrives, Vio­let is quick to induct her into an exclu­sive girl clique that includes Mega­lyn Echikunwoke’s Rose and Car­rie MacLemore’s Heather. And, well, that’s pret­ty much it in terms of plot. In time-hon­oured Still­man fash­ion, the remain­der of the film cat­a­logues the dat­ing mishaps, anti­quat­ed belief sys­tems, mere­tri­cious grand­stand­ing and all the char­ac­ter-build­ing ephemera that comes with the schol­ar­ly life.

Yes, it would prob­a­bly help if one was attuned to Stillman’s bone-dry wave­length before attack­ing Damsels, even if it is his most eas­i­ly digestible fea­ture to date. How­ev­er, this is a com­e­dy for the long haul, its humour deriv­ing as much from the cadence and rhythm of the script’s deliv­ery as the var­i­ous barbs and bons mots con­tained with­in it. One sur­pris­ing­ly bril­liant repeat gag plays off Rose’s lop-sided pro­nun­ci­a­tion of the word ​‘oper­a­tor’, while Gerwig’s beyond-dead­pan line read­ings make her a clas­sic Still­man heroine.

While he may occa­sion­al­ly paint them as boor­ish and mis­guid­ed, Still­man clear­ly empathis­es with all of his char­ac­ters, even the goofy jocks like Thor (Bil­ly Mag­nussen) and Violet’s sim­ple­mind­ed beau, Frank (Ryan Met­calf). Still­man views the world of high­er edu­ca­tion as an unmanned Pur­ga­to­ry where the search for knowl­edge plays sec­ond fid­dle to gain­ing a first­hand expe­ri­ence of the anx­i­eties of adult­hood, the mys­ter­ies of love and the sen­su­al depths of cheap motel soap. It’s an unabashed­ly roman­tic vision of cam­pus life, cap­tured in Stillman’s cute­ly pared-down direc­to­r­i­al style.

It cul­mi­nates in a Bus­by Berke­ley-style per­for­mance and Violet’s own efforts to jump start a dance craze she calls the ​‘Sam­bo­la’ (instruc­tions are includ­ed). Here, the bour­geoisie are human again, pos­sess­ing their very own dis­creet and inim­itable charms.