Damsels in Distress (***1/2)

Watch this for five minutes and you’ll probably know if you’ll like its alternate-reality take on college life, as seen by a quartet of female roommates at the fictional Seven Oaks. Greta Gerwig, Ben Stiller’s mumbling love interest in Greenberg, plays the much perkier, talkier Violet, leader of the quartet, who in the space of the film’s first five minutes nearly faints from “acrid” B.O., discusses “the problem with contemporary social life,” laments that an “atmosphere of male barbarism prevails” at her institution, extols the virtues of dating “sad sacks” and plain-looking and/or unintellient men, and thwarts a potential suicide. Violet and her stylized dialogue are the creation of director Whit Stillman, who with just four films (in 22 years) is easily one of the more stylistically distinctive filmmakers around. All of his films feature what might be called the intellectually aspirational class, twentysomethings who might in ten years be Woody Allen characters, but here it’s in a playful way.

As the title may suggest, the movie has the flavor of a period piece, but one in which a 1990s song* is a “golden oldie” and anal sex is (obliquely) referred to. Violet dreams of initiating a “dance craze,” and a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers-inspired musical number caps the film. At the same time, it doesn’t really seem like any actual old movies, although it slightly made me think of the recent French musical 8 Women. Of Violet’s friends, the one played by Megalyn Echikunwoke made me laugh the most by repeatedly issuing Anglo-Nigerian accented-warnings about “playboy-operator type” guys. Much of what amused me about the movie is hard to convey, but comes down to its unique brand of whimsy. For example, at Seven Oaks, there are no Greek-letter frats, only Roman letter ones, where the inhabitants are so dumb that they try to commit suicide by jumping from a second-story window.

The plot has something to do with Violet and her friends’ crusade to purge the campus of its coarser aspects, and some romantic mismatches, but, really, you won’t care about how any of that resolves itself. I’m not sure if Stillman intends to say anything about college, romantic attraction, suicide, the value of intelligence, lying, or any of the other things these damsels discuss, but that in no way distressed me.

* “Another Night” by Real McCoy

IMDb link

viewed 4/25/12 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 4/25/12 and 4/26/12