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| SHOCK TREATMENT: Violet and friends despair at another case of the uncouth. |
Whit Stillman’s
latest
film, Damsels in Distress,
comes knowingly close to being just another American college movie, with
Stillman introducing it at the Bradford International Film Festival as a “campus
comedy”. Straight away we’re introduced to some of the usual college
stereotypes: the jock, the barbie, the dufus… (“plural: dufi?”) as newcomer Lily
is identified by Violet, Heather and Rose as in desperate need of their help if
she is to survive. But it’s not the usual makeover
we’ve come to expect since Violet and her group carry a much nobler cause: to reduce
the number of on-campus suicides and help everyone realise their full potential
– “even if they don’t have much.”
So when the girls aren’t prescribing their peers with free donuts and
therapeutic tap-dancing at the on-campus Suicide Prevention Centre (“With
suicide, prevention is actually ten
tenths the cure…”), they’re braving frat house parties in search of souls in
need of saving. Snobby, patronising, and often as clueless as the goofs they
set out to help, we fall in love with Violet and her impeccably dressed Mother
Theresas for their sincerity. Despite their Stepford Wives poise, they’re
human too, and as the messy love triangles ensue Stillman finds heart and depth
in the objects of his satire as they outgrow their campus comedy moulds.
Stillman’s script is dappled with some excellent one-liners, and he
should be applauded for providing cinema with a new handful of great female comedy
roles. In amongst all that superficiality there are good comic performances,
but all inevitably end up playing support to Greta Gerwig’s excellent turn as
Violet. Emerging from a back catalogue of mumblecore movies with enough
integrity to spoof the goofs she made her name playing, Gerwig continues in her
rise as cinema’s queen of quirk. Speaking always with a dazed and deadpan
casualness, her Violet dispenses her own oddball brand of self-help while
looking beautiful in her bows and just a tad unwieldy in her tap shoes. (As a
filmmaker to which Stillman has been widely compared, it’ll be interesting to
see what Woody Allen has done with Gerwig in To Rome With Love, out later this year – though the trailer
looks typically bland.)
In aesthetic, too, Damsels
is tooth-rottingly sweet, the girls and boys looking just delightful in their preppy clothes while light dazzles
from every well-conditioned lock of hair and perfectly-flossed smile. It’s a
lot of fun, but I still want to believe that this was the sugar-coating of a
much bitterer pill – I’m not so sure. For all its fizzy satire and oddball
characterisation, Damsels sees
Stillman reinstate innocence and conservative values at the centre of the
college campus flick (although one instance of bum sex does manage to sneak under
the radar). This popcorn, I felt, needed a touch more salt.
But no matter. Damsels
revels in its own simplification of life, dissolving its love triangles and
break-up plots into a sun-drenched musical encore just in time for the (very
funny) end credits. Where it fails in breaking any new ground, Damsels’ intoxicating blend of depression-curing
soap, new dance crazes, and preppy fashion is enough to infect even the most
hardened graduate with its optimism.
Damsels in Distress gets 4 stars (but with extra icing).
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| Prevention - "ten tenths the cure…" |
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