Critic Ross Douthat has panned Damsels in Distress in National Review magazine (May 14, 2002).  He writes, “If the world of Damsels . . . isn’t the real one to begin with, then how much can we care about the characters’ struggles to build up their own equally unreal alternatives?”  I suppose the answer is that we can’t care about these struggles–but it doesn’t matter.  We know Violet is eccentric; we care about the values she endorses, such as self-improvement.  And we care about those messages and implications I mentioned which filter through in the basically tame world Stillman has created.

His first picture in 14 years, Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress (2012) revolves around three college girls who recruit a new student for their suicide-prevention center (at fictitious Seven Oaks College) and for their larger idealistic purpose of gently freeing the college from male “barbarism.”  In other words, they want their milieu to be more refined, albeit the leader of the pack is the strikingly eccentric Violet (Greta Gerwig), who aspires both to help the depressed–the suicidal–and to start a new dance craze.  The new recruit is reasonable Lily (Analeigh Tipton) and the other two coeds are Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke) and Heather (Carrie MacLemore).  Yes, they all bear the names of either flowers or flowery plant life.

I mentioned male barbarism, but Damsels is not a feminist film.  It is, in fact, philosophically conservative.  Violet says of her quartet, “We are all Christians.  Or, well, Judeo-Christians”–an important line.

What Stillman, writer and director, constructs here is a world which doesn’t really exist, but through which we receive messages and implications about the world which does exist:  our world.  One of the implications seems to be that “God’s in his heaven” and the human condition is not so bad.  (Unfortunately, after Violet loses her boyfriend and sinks into a depression, what gets her over it is not at all credible.)

Too, there’s a message that eccentricity, Salvador Dali-like “madness”, has little worth in our culture, that, according to Lily, “what the world needs is a large mass of normal people.”  And it may also be that Stillman is telling us that unless we generate what we genuinely value–everything from good hygiene to sensible religious belief–naught but absurdity will prevail.

Damsels in Distress is seriocomic and intelligent.  Only intermittently is it funny, but altogether it is very droll and very charming.  Stillman is still not examining his characters, although this time around it is rather unimportant since he’s letting go of verisimilitude anyway.  Like his Last Days of Disco, the current film ends with delightful dancing–in one sequence, to the tune of a Fred Astaire song.  This is how Stillman expresses his optimism but, well, since Violet considers dancing therapeutic, maybe in addition the folks here are giving a bit of therapy a try.  Who knows?  It would sort of justify Violet’s nutty idea of starting a new dance craze.

Greta Gerwig (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

About Lust, Caution (2007):

Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), frankly, is a man who deserves to die.

Along with being a traitor to his country in the Japanese-occupied Shanghai of the 1940s, he murders and tortures resistant Chinese countrymen.  Patriotic activists want to kill him; specifically, six university students do.  One of them, the inexperienced and romantic Wong (Tang Wei), agrees to infiltrate Mr. Yee’s circle by befriending his wife and then becoming his mistress.  By and by she will lure the evildoer to her fellow students’ gunfire.  But Yee is hard to assassinate.  For one thing, the sex between him and Wong, though it resembles agony, means something to Wong.  She is moved by Mr. Yee’s emotion, by what appears to be love.  At the same time, she does not doubt that he must die.

This is not all that’s going on.  “Would you believe me,” Wong says to Mr. Yee, “if I told you I hate you?”  Yee answers that, yes, he does believe her.  These words are spoken because instinctively Yee knows that Wong is a member of the resistance, that she is his enemy.  Maybe he suspects he is a doomed man.  But he never admits this and probably hopes he can win Wong over.  Critic James Bowman, in his website review, is right that Lust, Caution “transcends ideology . . . by making us see its irrelevance to the real well-springs of human action and feeling.”

This is one of Ang Lee’s best films.  The man who made Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) hasn’t lost his touch, for LC is adeptly directed and acted.  Its necessary eroticism earned it an NC-17 rating. . . Wong is a woman who barely conceals her passion.  Her breasts are small but, when she sleeps with Mr. Yee, her nipples are powerfully erect.  Copulation here proceeds in such a way that it belongs to a sphere of its own, a separate world.  Fascinating and honest–this is what Lee’s superlative film, based on a story by Eileen Chang, is.

(In Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles.)

Cover of Lust, Caution (Widescreen Edition)

Anyone who likes musicals should experience the very charming The Drowsy Chaperone if he or she gets a chance to see it.  The book by Bob Martin and Don McKellar salutes American musicals of the Jazz Age and, although it starts to sag after a while, is effectively mirthful and casually smart.  The music–by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison–seldom disappoints.  True, “Cold Feets” doesn’t cut it, but such songs as “Show Off” and “Love is Always Lovely in the End” are pleasant and exciting items.  As long as the singing and dancing are acceptable (they usually were in the local production I saw), it’s a heck of a show. 

The Drowsy Chaperone (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002) is a Hollywood remake of a 1999 Japanese film, and I could hardly figure out what was happening in it.  A horror concoction, it is strikingly creepy (aren’t they all?), but for me creepy isn’t scary.

Even so, congrats to Verbinski for his directing and to Charles Gibson for his supervision of visual effects.  They make it palpable that evil exists.  The sequence with the freaked-out horse is wildly, weirdly effectual, and the image of Naomi Watts holding a small, clothed skeleton while standing waist-deep in well water is sobering.  I wish The Ring had been better.  It has its virtues, but confusingly complex writing in a freakfest is not for me.  More simplicity, please.

The Ring (2002 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)