Damsels In Distress

After a month in theaters, Damsels In Distress appears to be a flop.  It might not gross a million dollars in the US, a hurdle cleared by the lamest of slasher movie sequels these days.  It was here in Norfolk for a single showing a day at the lone art house theater.  I saw it on the opening Saturday and there were maybe ten people in the audience.  It's gone now, after one week.  That has to be quite a disappointment for Whit Stillman, given that it's his first movie in fourteen years.  His previous, The Last Days Of Disco, also lost money.  He had many attempted projects that didn't make it to production in the interim. The public does not appear to be swept away by Stillmania.

The reviews of Damsels are meanwhile entertainingly mixed.  A lot of people really hated this movie, calling it twee, plotless, and insufferable.  Another group really loved it.  Count me among the latter.  (Really, isn't a movie that draws such a split reaction likely to be of more interest than one that draws a uniformly positive but unenthusiastic reaction?  A generic Ebert three star?)

All of Stillman's films concern the young--either college students (Damsels, Metropolitan), or just out (Barcelona, Last Days Of Disco).  Stillman's young people share three primary characteristics: 1. They're trying to figure out who they are. 2. They're trying to figure out the characteristics of a well-lived life. 3. They do these things by trying on roles, in hopes that one will feel right and stick.  Thus they speak in a somewhat stilted, affected manner, but do so with a deep sense of honesty which manages to fit comfortably with the muted dishonesty of the pretense.  That is, they're putting on airs, but with good intent.  I find myself a big fan of this earnestness, which is probably the number one reason I'm such a Stillman fan.  (I even read his entertainingly off-kilter novelization of The Last Days Of Disco, highly recommended.)

Damsels plays in a more absurdist key than the previous three movies.  The beliefs espoused Violet Wister (played by Greta Gerwig) are siller even than those of the utopian socialists and business literature devotees of Metropolitan and Barcelona.  Violet's twin pillars are the emotionally restorative powers of international dance crazes, and the civilizing influence of the proper women on distinctly unpromising frat boys.  Stillman lets us know that though he loves them and frequently agrees with them, he thinks Violet and her elegant posse are more or less nuts.  In one scene, this revelation relies on the audience knowing that Johann rather than Richard Strauss is the waltz king.  Naturally I approve of such a low-key joke, given the name of this blog.  Making the lead characters more obviously emotionally damaged is a bit of a departure from the previous movies.  Maybe this is the result of Stillman's increasing temporal distance from his subjects, given that he's 62 now.

Smartphones and tablets are completely ignored here, which I think is a wise approach.  Those devices have taken over daily life these days.  Movies haven't yet figured out how to handle this organically.  Sometimes a self-consciously hip (and therefore soon to be dated) style is used where characters ostentatiously post things to Facebook.  Other times precious plot minutes are wasted disposing of phones so that misunderstandings and hectic races to the airport can still occur.  Stillman just pretends the networked world away, preferring to shoot for the timelessness of people talking only to the people in their immediate proximity.

If it's still around your area, go help it clear the million dollar mark.  Otherwise, get it on Netflix, unfortunately probably available within a month.

Footnote: the sound is terrible, perhaps a budget casualty.  I thought it might have been just my theater, but it's mentioned in other reviews.  Something to clear up for the Criterion release.

People see the harm in what excessive candor can do

We all tend to carry in our heads a list of greatest movies. Almost everyone loves Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Casablanca, etc. Then there are movies that are more private treasures, ones which hit us where we live. We feel a little more possessive of them. We feel like we get these movies more than others do. Maybe that's a little snobby, and maybe that's OK.

A long way to begin a discussion of a movie that hits me pretty close: Whit Stillman's Metropolis. This is a tiny little film which came out in about 1990. In one sense I should not particularly be expected to identify with it. The story revolves around a core group of characters enjoying life as emerging members of New York high society. One earnest character resents the terms yuppie and preppie and in their place coins the term Urban Haute Bourgeoisie, UHB, pronounced "ubb." The time period is deliberately left a little ambiguous. The title cards announce that it's "Not So Long Ago." As the movie was shot on a tiny budget, Stillman took New York as he found it in the late 1980s. So the cars and clothes are from that era. But there are several cues indicating that the intended time is perhaps the late 1960s or early 1970s, when the old social order was rapidly crumbling. This leads to a running theme that the characters have an assumption of impending doom. They know that the system which served to ensure their life's path may no longer do so. It got them into Ivy League colleges (the movie takes place over Christmas break when they all return home to Manhattan). It was the era when the Ivies had a much larger proportion of gentleman's C-earning legacies than today. The system was then supposed to provide the men with jobs in prestigious law or finance firms, and the women with husbands in those firms, perhaps with positions running charity or arts organizations. But that is all ending in Metropolitan. The debutante balls are still going on, but have lost some of their import. They are an anachronism by this point--a woman attending college in 1970 is hardly in need of a social debut.

Stillman seems to blame the collapse of the family unit for the impending failure of the UHB youth. Several characters have divorced parents, and the splitting of households is shown to be a substantial financial setback. Nick Smith, the character played by Christopher Eigeman, is Stillman's alter ego, or at least the alter ego of Stillman's sardonic side. Nick articulates and defends the virtues of the class he belongs to. He loves the deb parties and the fine clothes. His fondest wish is that it would all continue, that the 20 year olds would become their parents. "I like everyone's parents," he says at one point.

One of the things I like so much about this movie is that it contains both cynical and earnest characters (Nick is both), and the cynical ones are not always given the advantage. They aren't privileged as clear-thinking realists. The earnest ones are given their due, and frequently have the better of the argument. The acting here meshes beautifully with the earnestness. The actors are in the main amateurs. Because the characters are also generally pretending to a greater degree of sophistication than they actually possess, the amateurishness works quite well. The dialogue feels mannered and rehearsed, as if the characters have been working on ideas and turns of phrases, waiting to unleash them whole in conversation. That is in fact how many collegians talk. What is charming is that the better characters (Audrey Rouget, Charlie Black) take their ideas very seriously. When avowed socialist Tom Townsend rationalizes his sudden incorporation into the elitist deb party culture, Charlie does not accept the inconsistency. "It's... it's untenable!" he sputters, and he believes with all his heart that showing that a behavior is untenable ought to be enough. We know that later in life, and not much later, he will tend to accept hypocrisy and compromise as necessary for getting through a life, but he doesn't yet.

Metropolitan also foresaw the Jane Austen boom. The plot is very loosely adapted from Mansfield Park. Tom Townsend and Audrey Rouget also discuss that book, a dialogue Stillman uses as commentary on the era. Mansfield Park features an exceptionally old-fashioned plot, in which young people left to their own devices, throw off the old morality by putting on a play. This is seen by the culture of the time as a gross moral lapse, a position taken by the book itself. Tom finds that ridiculous and believes Mansfield Park to be a bad book (he amusingly declares that he has not read it, but has read criticism of it, doubling his reading efficiency). Audrey defends the book and its idea of a virtuous heroine, a notion decidedly out of fashion in most 20th century literary fiction. The Mansfield Park play is given a parallel later in the movie, as despite Audrey's misgivings, the gang plays a truth game, in which the players must tell each other the absolute truth in response to any question. Cynthia, the shallowest character, does not see how truth can be bad, but Audrey knows otherwise.

I don't necessarily buy into all of Stillman's moral conclusions, but I appreciate that he's making arguments that very few filmmakers are even considering.

Stillman made two other movies, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco, about characters like these at slightly later points in their lives. Both are also excellent. After more than a decade, he is due to release his fourth movie, Damsels In Distress, later this year.