Whit Stillman is back after 14 years with another elegant, eccentric and utterly distinctive movie: a gorgeously if oddly coloured butterfly of a film, liable to get broken on the wheel of incomprehension or exasperation. It's a campus comedy of romance that does not render up its style and identity with the zappy eagerness of most movies. You have to let the film's language grow on you, and this is not a quick process, perhaps especially because the register of instantly readable irony is not present.
Greta Gerwig stars as Violet, a weirdly self-possessed student whose mission is to humanise and civilise the yobbish males on campus. She is the leader of a doe-eyed quartet of pretty, serious-minded co-eds, including Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke), who affects a British way of speaking, at one stage earnestly deploring a guy's pickup moves as those of a "playboy or operator". Violet prides herself on altruistically only dating boys who are less cool and less attractive. (Perhaps Stillman was inspired by John Bayley's reasons for going out with Iris Murdoch at Oxford: he guessed, entirely wrongly, that she would be considered less sexy than her contemporaries.)
Damsels in Distress is notionally set in the present day, and yet could quite as easily be set around the time of Stillman's first movie Metropolitan, more than 20 years ago, and at the same time gestures to an undefined era of innocence even further back. This is a world that appears ignorant of Facebook and Twitter and general campus politics. The characters often have the fey affectless style of something by Bret Easton Ellis, although without the drugs and sexual violence, and, for all its nurtured oddities, there is occasionally something quite real in the film's depictions of the earnestness and loneliness of student twentysomething existence. Stillman has plenty of conventionally funny moments, however – I loved the character called Thor (Billy Magnussen), afflicted by colour-blindness, for whom rainbows are source of emotional chaos.
At one stage, Violet tracks down a certain boy to his literature class, in which the lecturer is discussing the works of Ronald Firbank and Thomas Love Peacock, minor authors who paved the way for greater successors, and it sometimes seems as if Stillman is proclaiming his own elite minorness, a certain recondite quality, not easily consumed. A rare pleasure to watch, and a pleasure to have Stillman back.
