After a decade-plus absence from the screen, Playlist favorite Whit Stillman looks to be tentatively returning to indie cinema with a project called “Damsels In Distress.”
We say tentative because Stillman, the indie auteur behind the comedy of manners classics “Metropolitan,” “Barcelona” and “The Last Days Of Disco” (two of the three are under the Criterion imprimatur), has toiled away on two or three projects for the last decade and none have come to pass despite the filmmaker discussing them at every turn (which isn’t that often and he only appears in the press every two or three years).
However, this project, also known as “Diorissimo,” according to the OpenCastingLive (hat tip, the new issue of Production Weekly), the film has a start date of mid July and will shoot for five weeks in New York City. Update: We guess the dates have shifted. Variety, who confirms the report, says the shoot will be in August and September will no stars. It’s apparently an “ultra-low budget” production, but some Stillman is better than none, frankly.
The storyline posted at OpenCastingLive is:
[The picture] centers on a group of college girls who take in a new student and teach her their own misguided ways of helping people. Lily, a new student at Seven Oaks University, winds up filling in with a dynamic and highly individualistic group of girls, addicted to the elegance of the past: Heather, Violet and Rose all volunteer at the campus Suicide Prevention Center, convinced that musical dance, sharp clothes and good hygiene — the Dior perfume “Diorissimo” is their trademark — can all contribute to staving off the inevitable self-destructive impulses that follow hard on the heels of failed college romances. Despite their sophisticated talk and savvy use of perfume, the girls are plagued by Cupid’s arrows and must adjust their psyches to the onset of amour.
Stillman is, again, the writer/director on this project, and it’s set up at Westerly Films which is apparently some shingle under Castle Rock Entertainment. It sounds like another trademark Stillman film, but hey, we’re not about to argue with that at all. And it sounds like the film could boast a host of young female talent.
“Damsels In Distress” appears to be one that he hinted in a 2009 interview with the Village Voice, but refused to discuss, feeling as he had jinxed himself with previous projects. “I’ve made that mistake, talking about things before they actually happen and… don’t want to get more into that game. It might be a dark horse candidate, [but there’s a project] that’s never been mentioned, that I’ve kept under wraps, and that might actually be the [next] thing that goes ahead.”
While trying to adapt Christopher Buckley’s “Little Green Men,” (which he eventually abandoned) Stillman has spent most of his time trying to dig up funding for his spiritual Jamaican music project, “Dancing Mood,” which he said began gestating during his discovery of reggae and dub during the making of 1999’s “The Last Days Of Disco” (yes, the movie had music other than the ’70s dancefloor craze).
And good news for fans of “Barcelona” (Stillman’s best film in the minds of many Playlist members), the director does hope to bring it to Criterion to complete a box-set. “There’s a lot of hope,” he said last summer via WhitStillman.org. “The more noise we can make the better. [Criterion is] negotiating with Warners.”
Stillman’s erudite, acerbic and witty privilege and class-based films have direct lineage ties to the works of Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach (though the latter is probably loathe to admit that these days as the comparison has been made frequently). But everyone has an antecedent artistically and when Stillman first broke on the scene was was essentially known as the WASPy version of Woody Allen.
Either way, any project that precipitates the return of Stillman is one that we fully endorse and encourage.
