Damsels in Distress--director Whit Stillman's first film over a decade--is a delightfully odd film that struck me as a mixture of Wes Anderson's Rushmore and Jane Austen's Emma. The story takes place at the fictional liberal arts university "Seven Oaks", where three friends try to better their social and intellectual inferiors through "youth outreach" (attending frat parties to support the "morons" who reside there) and prevent student depression and suicide by providing coffee, donuts, soap, and dance lessons. The three girls, Violet, Heather, and Rose, speak in stilted, affected language. For example, Rose refers to slick men as "operators" instead of players. Their large vocabularies and quasi-philosophical discussions disguise a fair amount of social retardation and cluelessness. When the girls take transfer student Lily under their wing, they find themselves challenged by her normal way of looking at the world.
To me, the message of this movie is that underneath Violet, Rose, and Heather's (especially Violet, who is at the center of the story) lip service to charity and Christian kindness and generosity, these girls are run-of-the-mill self-absorbed, boy-obsessed college students. Violet claims to prefer to date homely, stupid men (and boy howdy, her boyfriend Frank is just about as dumb as a rock) because rather than aim for someone better than yourself and fail, it's wiser to aim for someone inferior to you and build them up to your level. This sounds incredibly narcissistic, yet when Frank cheats on Violet, she is heartbroken and lovelorn. Underneath that pretentious facade is a vulnerable young woman who, like many college-age young people, is in love with an idiot and in love with the drama of her own life. Or, as my boyfriend pointed out, Violet, Rose, and Heather like to date idiots because they are idiots, despite their verbose discussions.
Damsels in Distress is enjoyable for its weird and rambling humor, not for its plot or character development. In fact, there isn't much plot or character development at all. The film merely allows the viewer to drop in on these characters' lives for about a month or so: they gossip, date around a bit, and (very literally) tap dance their blues away. The end. The movie seems to be beyond any definite classification: it's quirky, but not in the overly self-aware way so many films are these days. It's not a teen sex comedy, a la American Pie, or a college movie like Animal House. It's about as far as you can get from a romantic comedy or love story. It's not really a drama either. It just exists on a plane all of its own. Hell, I'd go so far as to say that Damsels in Distress is a more unique movie-going experience than Tree of Life. And for this, I award the movie...
4 out of 5 stars
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