“Damsels in Distress” (2012)
“I don’t really like the word depressed, I prefer to say that I’m in a tailspin.”
Had “Damsels in Distress” turned out to be a misfire, it wouldn’t have been a huge surprise: Stillman wouldn’t have been the only filmmaker to return from a lengthy absence with his skills dulled by time. A premiere at the closing night of the Venice Film Festival didn’t seem to bode especially well, given the generally disappointing tone of festival closing movies, which normally take place long after most of the press have moved on to other pastures. Fortunately, “Damsels in Distress” was no such thing, delivering a college-set comedy that felt like Stillman moving towards some kind of wider accessibility, while remaining firmly inside a universe of his own creation. The story follows Lily (Analeigh Tipton), who upon arriving at Seven Oaks College, falls in with a trio of Queen Bees — well-meaning Violet (Greta Gerwig), fiery Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke) and dim-bulb Heather (Carrie MacLemore) — who take on both their boorish male counterparts and the problem of depression, only for one of their number to fall prey to the latter. It might look and feel like a sort of teen movie (and the film is arguably broader than anything he’s made before), but it’s really more indebted to an old-fashioned comedy of manners than it is to John Hughes, with Stillman’s typically sharp script delving into the self-absorbed minds of another collection of inspired comic creations. Despite none of the cast being out of short trousers the last time he had a movie in theaters, Stillman has found a new set of muses, with Greta Gerwig in particular fitting right at home as Violet. Alongside Tipton, they bring enough empathy to give the audience a way into Stillman’s stylized world. While perhaps not the most substantial of Stillman’s films (and the director has not taken to digital photography well — the film is overlit and ugly for the most part), it is uproariously funny, climaxing in a final dance number that sits among the director’s finest moments. [B+]
The Films That Could Have Been
Stillman wasn’t entirely idle in his 14-year absence: there were several projects that came close to getting made without ever quite coming together, plus lets not forget that he also wrote a novelization of his last movie called “The Last Days of Disco, with Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards” that was published in 2000. In the late 1990s, he was said to be penning an adaptation of Anchee Min‘s Shanghai-set memoir “Red Azalea.” Stillman told us last year that the project was something that he “wouldn’t pursue,” although he did suggest that he may return to the Chinese Cultural Revolution setting for another project.
Perhaps his best known near-miss was “Little Green Men,” an adaptation of the novel by Christopher Buckley (“Thank You For Smoking“) about a political talk show host that is abducted by aliens. Stillman officially signed on in 2006, and what he describes as a “billionaire” signed on to finance the picture, but the film never quite came together, and by 2009 he was off the project. Another recurring film is “Dancing Mood,” a Jamaica-set drama about the church dancehall scene in the 1960s, which also got as far as pre-production before financing collapsed. That one is, however, still an ongoing concern, with the director telling us in a recent interview that “I hope to make another film before then and then tackle that one.”
And that next film? Well, it’s unclear at this point, but it sounds like it might be a project that would team up Gerwig and Brody from “Damsels in Distress,” Chloë Sevigny from “The Last Days of Disco” and Stillman regular Chris Eigeman. But that project is still at the scripting stage, and Stillman also told the Village Voice recently that there’s another proejct, which he describes as “sort of Oscar Wildean, based on material in the public domain by someone else… escapism for the college-graduate set.”
– Rodrigo Perez, Sam Chater, Oliver Lyttelton
8/7/15 Bonus: Listen To The Film Society Lincoln Center 25th anniversary cast interview below.
