Damsels in Distress

Overview

"We're trying to make a difference in people's lives, and one way to do that is to stop them from killing themselves."

At Seven Oaks College, a group of gorgeous young women are determined to improve the acrid-smelling, hyper-masculine culture that prevails at the once boys-only campus. Led by the obsessive Violet (played by the ever-delightful Greta Gerwig), the clever coterie run a suicide prevention centre with a focus on doughnuts and dance as therapy. The film is director Whit Stillman's first since The Last Days of Disco (1998), and fans can expect his deliciously wry, dry, comedic portrayal of America's preppy and proper.

Violet is confident in her craziness, and her earnestness to improve the souls of her crude contemporaries is both comical and heartwarming in its sincerity. Her minions Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke), Heather (Carrie MacLemore) and Lily (Analeigh Tipton) are, yes, all curiously named after various flowers, and at once adorable and utterly ordinary.

It is through this ordinariness that Stillman depicts the complexities of finding one's identity. Each player attempts to invent a version of themself — Rose, a Londoner; Fred (fidgety, fabulous Adam Brody), a suave playboy — to varying success. Though the clique's intentions are to help those students who are ignorant, unintelligent, and downcast through a celebration of hygiene and dance, they, too, are subject to despair, and the realisation of their (and, indeed, our) shared anxieties is as refreshing as it is unnerving.

For all that Violet likes to 'civilise' those less intelligent than herself with both her soapbox and soap, new girl Lily is her opposite, questioning Violet's zealousness and suggesting that perhaps what society really needs is conventional, cool people en masse. The characters' seriousness, playfully contrasted by their retro-fabulous attire and self-deprecating rhetoric, keeps the film in a constant flux of funniness and unbearable awkwardness.

Despite, and possibly because of, the pretty 1950s frocks and the tap-dancing to Gershwin tunes, Damsels in Distress is fresh and relevant. There is a longing for lost innocence and echoes of the familiar desire of college students for romance and ideas. Whimsical and witty, and often unnerving in its honesty, the film has a only a brief run at the Dendy, so get in for a hit of Whit while you can.