A quick respite from the Damsels in Distress posts… The Criterion Collection have just announced that Metropolitan and The Last Days of Disco will be released on Blu-Ray on 24 July 2012, with what I think are the same extras as on the DVD versions.
'Metropolitan' Criterion Collection DVD cover
'The Last Days of Disco' Criterion Collection DVD cover
Here is more info on the Metropolitan and Last Days of Disco releases.
First, sorry the updates here are a little sporadic. I can’t keep up with this temporary flood of material! That said, onward…
Damsels in Distress: Whit Stillman on set
Stillman’s been busy chatting away to support Damsels in Distress recently and here’s the latest batch of interviews.
I completely forgot to post this interview by Farran Smith Nehme at Joan’s Digest when I last updated, but if you’re only going to read one of this bunch, then this is probably that one. Long and interesting:
Stillman: We sort of have to struggle in the film to get people to like Violet better. There’s this default, rather cliched — although we can’t criticize cliches in our film, as we raise them — there’s a cliched response where the outside character is the likable one from the audience point of view, and the insiders are the rather bad characters who need to be reprimanded and changed. Generally in our film it’s the reverse. It’s generally the outside character who has to wake up and be changed, in terms of transforming themselves. And in this case, the Lily character is not at all that idea… in fact, she’s the nemesis character in the film. It’s amazing that people don’t get that. And they say absolutely absurd things; they compare them to Mean Girls or Heathers or something like that. And they say, “The film finally comes alive when they meet the outsider Lily character.” That is the first scene in the film.
A little later in the interview, on the same theme:
Stillman: I adore [The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie]. One of the things I don’t like about it is that once again, this incredibly magical, dynamic character has to get her comeuppance. She has to be revealed to be sad, and misguided, and all these other things. And I just think there’s this form of movie, where they have an incredibly charismatic character, and they think the interesting, modern thing is to show the unhappiness and despair behind the mask, blah blah blah. I think that’s become a hoary cliche. The truth is that some of these people are great and fantastic.
Next, David Lambie has a very brief interview in the Bay Area Reporter but there is some new stuff:
David Lamble: Discuss Adam Brody’s obsession with “The Decline in Decadence.”
Stillman: I think there was a higher decadence in the past. I don’t know Jersey Shore, but that is like true decadence. Before, the decadents were trying to get by the obstacle course of respectable society, and the tension led to the creation of these artistic personas that were so interesting. I’m not sure what Max Beerbohm’s relationship to that group was, he was very close to the Oscar Wilde group, but when everything became controversial, he exiled himself to Italy and stayed there. It was an interesting dynamic of camouflage and daring, and it led to some really interesting comic creations.
Also, I had no idea that, as this interview reveals, the guy who plays the “haughty bouncer” in The Last Days of Disco, Burr Steers, wrote and directed Igby Goes Down, and is Gore Vidal’s nephew.
At Time Out Chicago, Ben Kenigsberg has a brief interview in which we read this about Stillman’s long years between movies:
He wasn’t completely absent from behind the camera. “I shot commercials in Indonesia and Singapore,” he says. “I had a friend who was working for a chocolate company over there, and so I shot commercials for the chocolate company. Which were kind of like mini versions of the films I did — there’s a lot of music and dancing.”
I don’t think I knew that either… now, how do we track those down…?!
Another brief interview, this time at SF Gate with G. Allen Johnson ends on a slightly sombre note:
“I have a lifetime supply of scripts written, but I’d like to write some new stuff, too,” [60-year-old] Stillman said. “The window-closing thing is so true. In the last two years I’ve had to face reality, and realize I have to focus on those things that would be gratifying and doable.”
Peter Suderman at the Washington Times has an interview, the title of which reflects this segment, about the way rich people are often represented on TV:
Mr. Stillman recalls directing an episode of the TV show Homicide: Life on the Street. He had a script he liked, but a rewrite turned a yuppie victim — whose family had been murdered — into “this awful, caricatured yuppie villain.”
“We don’t necessarily want to do a PR job for them,” he says of the character type. “But we also don’t want to dehumanize them, either.” He objected to the rewrite and is sure he was “blacklisted” — his explosive and unprompted term — from directing television as a result.
This topic crops up again as the Guardian’s Xan Brooks interviews Stillman on video (which I haven’t watched yet). From the article:
In any other movie, [Greta] Gerwig’s infuriating, Stepford-esque co-ed would be relegated to the sidelines and played as a grotesque. Yet the director clearly adores her; even identifies with her. He explains that his heroine is an idealist and that he has always loved idealists, because they are fragile, often lonely, easily shattered. … The problem, he suggests, is that Hollywood has conditioned its audience to pre-judge people in terms of their class background and to dismiss the heroines of Damsels in Distress as “pampered little rich kids”, undeserving of our sympathy.
Miriam Bale interviews Stillman about fashion for ‘The Measure’ at The L Magazine:
I got a really nice Madras jacket from Ralph Lauren, so reduced they almost paid me to take it out of the store. And I was so happy to put it on and see how it looked on a hot summer day in New York, this very light Madras jacket. … I love them. They’re so light and comfortable, and I think they can be so good-looking.
Chris Eigeman, on the other hand, doesn’t share the same point of view. He hates them. And for some reason I always dress Chris in Madras. There’s a scene in Barcelona where he’s supposed to be a very badly dressed civilian, so we put him in yellow trousers and a Madras jacket. And there’s a scene in Last Days of Disco, when he’s leaving to go to Europe with Jimmy Steinway, and I think he wears another Madras jacket. And when it came to record the DVD commentary, he was going on about how ugly that jacket was and how he hated wearing it, but I was dressed exactly like he was in the film!
At the Wall Street Journal they have an odd half-interview by Thomas Vinciguerra, in which the questions are omitted, leaving a series of unconnected statements from Stillman:
The three films I find most perfect are The Shop Around the Corner, Top Hat and Howards End.
My favorite director is Mark Sandrich because he made my favorite film, which is The Gay Divorcee.
Jack Giroux at Film School Rejects has a good interview with Stillman that focuses more than most on the process of writing and making movies:
Stillman: …there’s a course I took very seriously and enjoyed a lot of aspects of, the Robert McKee story course. My best relationship with that course is I had a friend — who had very forward notes and had this weird curly-cue handwriting — and he took very sparse notes of the class. Extrapolating from his notes, I found it really stimulating and used that when I was writing Barcelona. Just having a key few phrases was great. When I took the course itself, and it seemed really good, McKee said, “You cannot create characters based on dialogue and you can’t create a story writing scenes.” I figured out later what he said you could not do is the only way I knew how to do it. The only way I knew how to do it is having people say something to each other, and maybe they get their voice, come alive, and maybe they start doing things. For me, the dialogue thing is kind of helpful.
We’re nearly there, only a few more interviews to go today. Come on!
The New York Post has an average interview by Kyle Smith:
As befits the creator of memorably threadbare preppies who discourse about the problem of being ornately spoken but shabbily funded, Stillman … is not awash in riches. He shops at Ralph Lauren Polo, but “on the fourth sale,” he says. “The first week in August, when they try to unload the really unfortunate mistakes.”
So he’s on the low end of the high end, much as George Orwell described himself as “lower upper-middle class”?
“I am so Orwell,” Stillman replies. “I went from Down and Out in Paris and London being a project I wanted to film to a life I was living.”
At the Globe and Mail, Rick Groen interviews Stillman:
Stillman: The strange thing about my period of failure, of not making a film, is that I felt much better about the thing I most worried about — writing a script. Because I really didn’t feel I was best suited to being a writer. There’s so much fighting with it. Now I just think people must be bad writers if they love it.
However, when I’m actually making a film, there are always naysayers in the process and production ends up being like 18 months of pure, sweating tension. So I want to be on a film to escape the solitary writer’s life, but now the solitary writer’s life seems very appealing to me. You know, after Krzysztof Kieslowski made Three Colours, they asked him what he wanted to do, and he said he just wanted to sit in a dark room and smoke. I’m not a smoker, but that just seems to me the perfect image.
Leo Robson at the Financial Times has an almost oddly short interview after a longer introduction. But there’s still a good bit on Stillman’s influences:
Stillman talked at speed, and almost always with love. “I adore Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise. Salinger’s Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters is one of the greatest things ever.” His frame of reference goes from Robert L Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers (a primer on economic thought) to the novels of Louis Auchincloss (a character in Metropolitan is shown reading The Rector of Justin) to Walter Jackson Bate’s biography of Keats.
…
Stillman prizes most in other people’s work what he excels at in his own. He loves “the first five or 10 minutes” of true crime documentaries, “when they do the scene-setting”. He emphasises the elements of “social reality” in Hitchcock’s films, so often associated with enclosed or paranoid worlds.
Finally for today, Stillman was interviewed on BBC Radio 4′s Front Row, which can be listened to here (starts at 21:16), although I suspect that might only work for those in the UK. The host John Wilson finds it hard to be sympathetic to the movie’s girls:
Wilson: I found that pretty hard.
Stillman: I know, it’s very hard for people. It’s the struggle in the film to get beyond what people assume. Because they see these girls who are well put together, and very opinionated, and they think they’re mean girls. This is not Mean Girls.
Wilson: No, it’s not that, it’s that they’re not worldly wise, they’re very self-obsessed, and there’s an arrogance to them.
Stillman: Oh no, no, that’s a misinterpretation. Yes, there is arrogance and condescension but in the service of humanity. I think the comparison, and it’s only something I thought about after making the film, is really with Wes Anderson’s Rushmore. This is the prettier, female, university version of Rushmore.
And it goes on. Worth a listen if you can.
Well done for getting through all that. Tomorrow we’ll catch up on all the reviews.
A bunch of odds and ends to get us up-to-date.
Nate Freeman has a slightly rambling article which is ultimately a report from last week’s screening of Damsels in Distress at Film Society of Lincoln Center, with Stillman and some of the cast. It starts with an anecdote from when the crew were scouting for locations for the movie. Whit Stillman had gone missing.
[A production] assistant ventured into the museum-hosted gala and circulated among the men in suits, hoping to spot the director—the beloved scribe of Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco — who had finally come around to making a new movie. And then, between men bearing canapes and women in big dresses, there was Whit Stillman chatting up a guest. The assistant politely waited for the conversation to end before interrupting.
“I’m sorry, Whit,” he said. “But we have to get back to the scout.”
“How did you find me?” the director said, smiling.
“Whit,” the assistant said. “All of your films are about parties, so when I heard this one going on …”
Amusing enough, although saying Stillman had “finally come around to making a new movie” seems a little, er, ignorant.
Next, Forrest Wickman at Slate investigates the important question Were the Cathars Really Sodomists? prompted by a line in the movie.
Moving on, at Huffington Post there’s a video of the cast and Stillman (scroll to the bottom for the article and endure the pre-roll ad) chatting about the movie, parties, and their college experiences:
And then one more video, this time at UInterview, with Analeigh Tipton and Adam Brody:
Somehow this slipped through the net, but I’m glad I caught it… Last week David Haglund at Slate tracked down some pieces written by Whit Stillman in the 1970s in a magazine called The American Spectator. One of these is a “long-ish short story that prefigures Stillman’s movies — especially his newest one, Damsels in Distress“:
Like that new film, which follows a group of girls who work to prevent suicide at fictional Seven Oaks College by promoting tap dance and good hygiene, “Under the Condor” is about collegiate depression. Published in three parts, the story begins with a macabre epigraph: “Japanese students blow their brains out when they do not get into the college of their choice; Americans some time after they do.” While Damsels was inspired by a group of 1970s Harvard undergraduates, “Under the Condor” actually portrays a set of 1970s Harvard undergraduates; the story is overstuffed with local color: Lowell House, Plympton Street, Lamont Library, Café Pamplona, and so on.
The protagonist is “Jane Repton of Quincy House,” a sophomore. Her father is a senior partner at the amusingly named firm of Solitary, Poor; her mother’s family fortune has dwindled to “a few hundred thousand dollars in worthless Confederate government bonds and an allegiance to the courtly ways of a bygone era.” Jane writes poetry, and has lately become depressed. Her earnest classmate Ben Pasquali is about to found COTTON MATHER’S Magazine for the Arts at Harvard, dedicated to “interestingness.” (“By calling the magazine ‘Cotton Mather’s’ I hope to gain for it the acceptance of the descendants of the Puritans,” Ben says, “who still really run things at Harvard.”)
And Haglund links to all three parts of the story, available online. I haven’t had a chance to read these yet, but it’s a great find.
The same site also has a couple of other Stillman articles from the same periodical:
The only other thing on that site that I don’t think we’ve seen here before is an article Stillman wrote in 2000 at Salon, in which he “picks five essential books for the Bass Weejuns set.” He describes them in more detail, but the titles are:
UPDATE: I thought it seemed unlikely that we didn’t already have that last link on this site; we did, on the Press page but I think the article’s title may have changed since the link was added there.
A little belated, sorry, but thanks to Dolly McElmore in the comments here are Indiewire’s thoughts on Damsels in Distress‘s opening weekend:
$58,589 in 4 theaters; PSA (per screen average): $14,647
Benefiting from some of the best press coverage for an indie release this year, these grosses in four great NY/LA theaters put Damsels in Distress at the higher end of 2012 platform releases. The consistently favorable and thoughtful reviews emphasized the film’s quirky and risky tone, preparing audiences for something completely different from the standard young-adult character film. Stillman’s first films two decades ago opened (with much lower ticket prices) to higher grosses, but that was during an era far more receptive to idiosyncratic observations with far less competition in any given week.
What it means: These grosses seem solid; combined with SPC’s usual guaranteed access to top theaters around the country, they will give the film momentum and a chance to be a real success (particularly with its reported $3 million production cost). WOM (word of mouth) is going to be decisive here even more than usual – this is not an ordinary comedy, but somewhat provocative (even irritating to some) while still entertaining. In other words, not an easy film to describe in the one-phrase manner so much of film marketing depends on, which means that at this point its future is more in the hands of those who have seen it and recommend it.
Fingers crossed… I’m not sure how to tell how many cinemas the movie’s on this weekend, although it seems to be more than last. According to Google Movies this Friday it’s still only on at two in New York but will be on at five in Los Angeles and two in Chicago… (those links won’t work right by Thursday, sorry).
Landmark Theatres list the film as “coming soon” to Boston, Chicago, Indianapolis, San Diego, Seattle, St Louis and Washington DC.
In reviews of Damsels in Distress Greta Gerwig has been getting as much attention as the rest of the cast put together, so I guess it’s not a surprise that nearly all the interviews that aren’t with Whit Stillman are with her.
Damsels in Distress: Greta Gerwig
From last Friday we have this interview with Christopher Rosen at the Huffington Post:
“[Whit] was thinking about me for the role of Lily [played by Analeigh Tipton in the film]. I would have played Lily happily, but I had kinda fallen in love with Violet. I begged him to read for it; I wanted to audition for it. I brought my tap shoes. I did a tap dance and I sang. They didn’t ask me to do that, I just did it on my own. But I really wanted the part. In retrospect, it seemed like a really Violet move.”
The next day she’s interviewed by Tara Aquino at Complex at a little more length:
Do you believe any of [your character Violet's] offbeat convictions?
Gerwig: I believe all of it. My mom is actually a psych nurse. She saw the movie when it premiered in L.A. and she had really interesting things to say about it. She really thought it was very smart, and very, in its own way, realistic about how something like dancing can make you feel better and connect you with people, and get your body moving and get your endorphins going, and how it’s really helpful.
The following day Hermione Hoby had an interview with Gerwig in the (UK) Sunday Telegraph, although despite the headline (“Whit Stillman’s new star”) Damsels is a minor point:
Gerwig was desperate for the part. ‘I tap-danced!’ she exclaims, when she describes her audition. ‘He didn’t ask me to, I just showed up and said I had tap shoes and I’d like to tap and then I’d like to sing a song. I just really went for it. Ha!’
Ha, yes, who knew?!
On Monday it was the turn of Matt Pais at RedEye who interviews Gerwig on video. They also have a transcript of the exchange:
What do you think the movie is getting at with the passive-aggressive, arguable empty-headedness of the leader?
Gerwig: I think actually the leader of the pack—it is a situation of, “Physician heal thyself”—but I think she’s not empty-headed. And I do think that Whit really loves Violet. And I think of all the characters I think Violet is the closest to his worldview. I think he actually does think that tap dancing and musical theater and sharp dressing and perfume can make people feel better about themselves. That’s not satire for him; that’s totally 100 percent how he thinks. So even though she suffers from some of the things that she’s trying to correct for other people, she’s incredibly sincere about what she’s trying to do. She really does believe in all of it. And she really wants to help people. She’s not just trying to control them for the sake of controlling them. She really wants people to be happier.
That’s all the Greta for now!
Stillman has been doing more interviews around the launch of Damsels in Distress.
Damsels in Distress: Whit Stillman on set
First of this batch is a brief one with Stephanie Merry at the Washinton Post. In my previous roundup of reviews I questioned J.Hoberman’s comparison with Woody Allen, but Stillman seems to go for it here:
“It’s fantastic, the reference to Woody Allen,” Stillman said. “But I thought it was a little illegitimate before, because he is very funny and breaks all the rules in order to have the comedy the best it can be. So he’s not naturalistic and realistic in a lot of his films. And this is the first film where I think the Woody Allen comparison is more relevant, because I think we’re taking liberties with naturalism in this film.”
At Gothamist John Del Signore has a much more substantial interview with Stillman, which is well worth a read. He talks about the film’s low budget, the locations, the casting, and the dancing, but regular fans will be most interested in the discussion of favourites from previous movies:
Gothamist: I was wondering about was Chris Eigeman. That’s probably the only problem I had with the film, that he wasn’t in it.
Stillman: Yeah, I’m still pissed off at the guy. I wanted him to play Professor Ryan. I would have made it a bigger deal. He would have been great in that.
What happened?
He wouldn’t do it.
Why not?
You’ve gotta ask him.
Maybe I haven’t been paying close enough attention but I don’t remember seeing him in anything recently.
Well that’s one of the things he told me, that he was feeling really bad about acting, he was really down on acting. He’s been trying to get a film off the ground. But then I see that the other person who no-showed on my production was that Lena Dunham girl. She then cast him in her TV show so the two people who no-showed to our film are collaborating together, acting. What ingrates and traitors.
Said, one assumes, with his tongue in his cheek. And then there’s this, which is also interesting:
Yeah, we have a tentative joke thing where Taylor Nichols cast as Charlie Black in this film, so that’s kind of an afterthought and I’m not too sure how serious that is. I liked what we did with Last Days of Disco, that was more seriously thought out, that he appears there with Audrey Rouget. That really seemed to make sense to me. I’m not really interested in those characters later in life. I think there are other things. We could continue this film, the guys from the fraternity. I think they could be a funny TV show.
Ella Taylor has a shortish interview with Stilman at NPR:
“I do find something touching about a sincerely scholarly idiot,” he says — “these people who are wound up and have aspirations, but they’re not intelligent at all, and their sensory apparatus is limited, but they’re determined to prove themselves in this way. To be an intelligent barbarian is kind of awful. But someone who is unintelligent, and aspiring to scholarly achievement, it’s really touching and encouraging. It’s a utopian thing, I think.”
Matthew Perpetua at Rolling Stone does things a bit differently, interviewing both Stillman and novelist Mark Leyner (who’s releasing his first book in 15 years) at once. It’s quite a nice conversation, arguing over who’s had the longest hiatus, and discussing problematic past projects. Here’s Stillman:
It’s terrible to write what are essentially comedies for people with no sense of humor. Everyone thinks they have a sense of humor, but observably not. I think I wrote the funniest scene I have ever written in my life for Little Green Men, and the person who is the development person at the company I was trying to do it for is foreign and very pretentious and very serious and very dramatic. Very dramatic, everything is dramatic. When he was explaining why he didn’t like my draft, it was just such a hilarious conversation; this person was sort of struggling to say, “This is weird, this is strange.”
Todd Gilchrist on the Wall Street Journal blog confronts Stillman a little about only writing films with rich people in:
WSJ: How then do you think about this movie in terms of it potentially being interpreted as sort of a “one percent” kind of movie because it does exist in a financial or an economic strata that some people can’t relate to?
Stillman: Well, that would be a very mistaken impression, because these protagonists of this film are not rich at all. I strongly think the whole concept of 99 percent more percent is totally ridiculous and detestable, but Violet and Rose, who dominate the film, are not affluent people. Violet’s parents were penniless writers and they died and she’s probably been brought up by some grandparents, and maybe you would see her and say she’s sort of this opinionated, dominant stylish person, but that has nothing to do with her or her economics. I mean, I think people are getting misdirected because I made Metropolitan, but there’s no relationship economically between these girls and the Metropolitan characters.
WSJ: Sure. But throughout your career, fairly or unfairly, you’ve been associated sort of upper-crust characterizations. Have you thought consciously about trying to do something that people might see as different?
Stillman: Of course. The two projects I was working on that didn’t get made were people on a collective farm in China during the Cultural Revolution, although they were people from an educated background who were forced on to a collective farm. And then, [the other one was about] people from a church in Kingston, Jamaica. So we have been trying to do different things but you know, God didn’t want me to do them.
At IFC Stillman is joined by Adam Brody and Hugo Becker. On Brody:
By embodying many of Stillman’s recurring themes — as Chris Eigeman used to — Brody becomes a bit of the writer/director’s surrogate. In fact, Stillman hopes to pair the two actors in his next project. “I don’t know why he’s taken such a liking to me,” Brody said. “I’m flattered, but I don’t feel nearly as sharp as Chris Eigeman. I’m not worthy!”
And that’s all the Stillman interviews for now.
ETOnline has a “Behind the Scenes” video from Damsels in Distress:
I say “behind the scenes”; it’s a publicity reel of the actors telling us how wonderful and beautiful the other cast and crew are over the top of the briefest of out-takes, but it’s charming enough.
If you still haven’t had enough of reading reviews of Damsels in Distress, here are a bunch more from over Easter. If you only read one, then Richard Brody’s in The New Yorker is maybe the most interesting. Here’s the current crop of longer and/or big-name reviews…
Farran Smith Nehme at the New York Post seems to like the movie (3.5 stars) with one caveat:
The episodic structure means some scenes feel disconnected, and Violet’s own bout of depression (“I prefer the term ‘tailspin,’” she tells people) goes on a little longer than desirable.
Greg Evans at Businessweek gives the film three stars (I assume out of five) and seems to like it, calling Greta Gerwig’s Violet “a breakthrough performance”.
J. Hoberman at ArtInfo is also keen on the film, and Gerwig, saying “her often ungainly, impossibly mannered Violet is the most authentic element in Damsel.” Hoberman also thinks the final musical number is a “shameless homage to the dreadful Woody Allen musical Everyone Says I Love You” which seems unlikely… surely, if it’s a homage, it’s a homage to other, older, musicals (although I haven’t yet seen it myself).
I think Sam Adams in the LA Times likes Damsels, although it’s a little hard to tell and even his sign-off is ambiguous:
Gerwig and Echikunwoke deploy weapons-grade poker faces, but Stillman too often substitutes pith for insight, until even that is drowned out by the sound of him chortling into his sleeve.
Across the continent, A.O. Scott in the New York Times also isn’t overly enthusiastic:
Mr. Stillman’s control of the tone also seems wobbly. The far-fetched absurdism of some of the humor — the boy who doesn’t know his colors, for instance — rubs awkwardly against some of the sharper satirical insights. The musical score, by Mark Suozzo and Adam Schlesinger (Fountains of Wayne), evokes a bad television movie from the 1980s, and its deployment is as haphazard as the pacing and juxtaposition of the scenes. The actors often lack direction, both in the sense that they do not seem to have been instructed in how to play their roles and also in the more literal sense that they do not always appear to know which way to walk, or how fast.
At Hitfix Geoff Berkshire thinks that even if the movie isn’t perfect on first viewing, it’s built to last:
I have a hunch Damsels is the sort of film that seems enjoyable but slight on a first viewing, then ages surprisingly well over time. You know the kind: Quotes and characters linger in your memory long after you’ve seen it. You can’t pass up an opportunity to drop in on it during a cable rerun. And, in this case, Stillman has made an entertainment with enough depth to hold up over repeated viewings.
In the Atlantic Eleanor Barkhorn seems to feel something is lacking:
We’re meant to recoil from Lily’s celebration of averageness and embrace Violet’s “uniqueness, eccentricity, independence.” But the message doesn’t resonate. The movie is so set in its own fantasyland that the rules of this world don’t seem to apply.
There’s nothing wrong with a happy movie, of course. Stillman is right to reject the indie assumption that to be meaningful, a film has to be depressing. But it would have been nice to believe that some of the characters’ tap-dancing joy could be realized beyond Seven Oaks.
(I don’t know about you, but I’m realising how much of the average movie review is simply taken up with recounting the setting and the plot.)
Jeannette Catsoulis at NPR is much more positive, recommending the film:
Though the screenplay’s whimsy may be too rich for some, Stillman’s writing has a singular intelligence that has become an increasingly rare pleasure in the movie theater.
Richard Brody has a fairly long and interesting review in the New Yorker:
The controlled manners of [Stillman's] superb quartet of actresses are now built on an expressly distant and prescriptive throwback to bygone Hollywood ways—emptied of history and of personality and infused with moralism. In the feminine bouquet that he gathers, the predominant bloom is Allan Bloom. Its sorrows are authentic; its anachronistic prescriptions suggest the proud doctrinal self-assurance of the latecoming prophet. Damsels in Distress is a great movie even though, at times, it’s not even a good one.
Dana Stevens at Slate loves the final dance number but doesn’t find the rest of the film quite convincing:
Stillman has always excelled at writing a certain style of comic dialogue in which characters converse earnestly with one another in a kind of hermetic preppy code, completely unaware of how ridiculous and insular they sound to us (though our disposition toward them is affectionate, not mocking). In fact, Stillman’s first and best movie, the effervescent drawing-room satire Metropolitan, took that code—and the characters’ anxiety about how it would translate to their imminent post-college lives—as one of its main subjects. In Damsels in Distress, the Stillman style has come unmoored from its reason for existence. Too ethereal to be a satire and too arch to be a psychologically recognizable character portrait, Damsels in Distress flits prettily by without ever finding anything to be about. We don’t know how to enter into any of the girls’ stories, though Violet’s comes frustratingly close to inviting us in.
And that’s all the reviews for now!
The final post of the week, and we have several reports from the New York premiere of Damsels in Distress on Monday night. So, if you’re interested in what people were wearing…
