Damsels in Distress (2012)

Damsels in Distress (2012), directed by Whit Stillman, 4 stars

Be prepared to leave reality behind when you enter the world of Seven Oaks College.  Like the fog-bound characters of “Brigadoon,” students enrolled there give off a familiar scent (and some also have an overdeveloped sense of smell to go with it), but there’s scarcely a whiff of reality about them.  They range from smarter than smart to dumber than dirt, especially the residents of DU, one of the many campus fraternities that use the Roman rather than the Greek alphabet to identify their organization.  They’re all as delightfully eccentric a collection of characters as has ever been assembled in an institution—at least one of higher learning.  Greta Gerwig as Violet together with her floral band (Heather, Rose and Lilly) are involved extracurricularly in saving fellow students from suicide or worse—leaping from the second story of an academic building and simply seriously hurting themselves.  They do this with a dash of psychoanalysis and a serving of donuts, and they are actually very good at what they do.  Their advice may not always be the best, but it comes from the best of intentions.  And, besides, nobody dies.  Greta is also interested in starting a dance craze, the Sambola, but in this she is not nearly so successful.  Nor does she do as well as she would like in her relationships with men, which are inspired by her desire to elevate the most inferior of the species to more exalted status.  As they stroll about the campus, which they only seem to do at dusk, the distressed damsels emit an angelic, golden glow.   During their magic hour meanderings, Violet and friends maintain their focus on the positive changes they are attempting to make.  The film is less of a narrative than a sequence of somewhat related vignettes that follow both their perils and progress.

I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to reveal that the film’s denouement features a dance sequence to the lovely and much under-appreciated Gershwin tune, “Things Are Looking Up.”  I suppose IMDB might file this under trivia, but (I think) it’s worth pointing out that this song originated in a classic 1937 Fred Astaire film, the most singular “A Damsel in Distress.” Clearly writer/director Whit Stillman knows his RKO musicals, and he has created an equally contrived yet clever screenplay, at least in some small part as an homage to the original.  (On a related note, there’s also a particularly bad tap dancer who has adopted the name, Freak Astaire.)  And like "Brigadoon," another musical which I mentioned earlier, I can easily fantasize reentering this world 100 years in the future and be just as enchanted by it as I was this time.