Damsels in Distress (2012)
Directed by Whit Stillman
A trio of beautiful girls set out to revolutionize life at a grungy American university: the dynamic leader Violet Wister, principled Rose and sexy Heather. They welcome transfer student Lily into their group which seeks to help severely depressed students with a program of good hygiene and musical dance numbers.
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4 films that influenced Damsels in Distress
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It doesn't quite match the 20-year stretch when Terrence Malick sat out cinema (between 1978's Days of Heaven and 1998's The Thin Red Line), but until Damsels in Distress, writer-director-producer Whit Stillman hadn't made a movie in 14 years — and that's something akin to a tragedy.
The initial conceit is a beaut: to upend Heathers and Mean Girls by turning the central trio of insouciant alpha-hotties into do-gooders who march into dorms, pull students off their suicidal ledges, and put them in tap shoes to sing and dance.
If you can imagine what Mean Girls would have been like had it been directed by Jim Jarmusch, you're on the right track.
What results is something of a highbrow Mean Girls , in which the introduction of a fourth wheel shakes up the group dynamic, and the new girl finds her own identity outside of it.
In admittedly reductive terms, Damsels in Distress — the first film from writer-director Whit Stillman since 1998’s The Last Days of Disco — is Mean Girls or Heathers transplanted to an Ivy League-like institution of higher learning where everything’s aglow and to which co-ed living is a fairly new concept.
Along the way, they end up in a series of romantic entanglements, silly subplots, and sanity checks that fall somewhere between Heathers and Mean Girls.
This time, he plays with the type of college comedy tropes we've seen in so many movies over the years and delivers one of his most inventive scripts to date in trying to create a movie that feels like "Mean Girls" by way of "Mystery Team."
During the golden days of Hollywood's big studio system, directors such as Michael Curtiz and John Ford made three or four films a year, hoping that perhaps every couple of years a Stagecoach or a Casablanca would survive.
The upper-crust characters of writer-director Whit Stillman have always been snooty, but in his earlier films (Metropolitan, Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco) that quality was tempered by his wit and modest budgets.
It may lack the overt sociology of his last two Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco , but by the same token it lacks their occasional self-consciousness, and it is certainly the most open and friendly of the four features in Stillman's canon; though there is something inherently brittle about his style even here, none of his films have such a loose, light soul, none are this much fun to watch, and as a result, none are so ready to give up their depths.
His 1990s trilogy, "Metropolitan," "Barcelona" and "The Last Days of Disco," distilled martini-dry humor from the foibles of the trust-fund set.
It�s good to have Whit Stillman back among working directors since it�s been a long time since his last feature in 1998 (The Last Days of Disco, which followed the signature films he made in the early Nineties, Metropolitan and Barcelona).
But Violet has principles and lives by them, and for Stillman — the chronicler of the Northeastern WASP elite’s youthful eccentricities, who hasn’t released a film since “The Last Days of Disco” in 1998 — that matters more than anything else.