Rom-com is an action movie for Scrabble players
Starring: Greta Gerwig, Adam Brody, Analeigh Tipton Playing at: AMC cinema Parents’ guide: Brief sexual situations, no nudity, lots of
fancy-pants words. The scene: Seven Oaks College (fictional). The time: Present day (semifictional).
Huh? How can the present be semi-fictional?
Simple. Because this is a Whit Stillman comedy.
While the leafy East Coast campus setting may seem familiar, and the students’ antics, too, the sensibility and vocabulary are definitely not.
Jane Austen’s Animal House, one movie wag has dubbed it.
Here, nobody says “yeah” – it’s always “yes.” They don’t say “bug” – they say “chastise.” No one’s a loser – he’s a “sad sack.” “You free today?” becomes “Have you the day off ?” People use words like “extirpate” and “salutary.”
Violet Wister (Greta Gerwig) and her roommates – the equally floral Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke) and Heather (Carrie Maclemore) – run a suicide-prevention centre at the college. They enlist a new girl, lanky transfer student Lily (Analeigh Tipton), to perk up the spirits of depressed undergrads with music and dance classes.
Goody-two-shoes, these girls? Only to a point.
They can’t resist the romantic pull of the boys on campus: smooth operator Charlie Walker (Adam Brody), hunky Xavier (Hugo Becker) and clueless frat boys Frank (Ryan Metcalf) and Thor (Billy Magnussen). When their beer-fuelled shenanigans get the boys’ fraternity banned, the girls practise the “youth outreach” they preach and come to their rescue.
It’s a situation rom-com, an action movie for Scrabble players, a musical comedy for fans of Fred Astaire, as the kids spell out their futures, dance and sing and grow up.
The dialogue is witty. “Have you ever heard the expression ‘Prevention is nine-tenths the cure?’ ” one girl says. “Well, in the case of suicide, it’s actually ten-tenths.” Parties at the Roman-letter frat houses are for “the worship of Bacchus, Beerus and Blotto.” Xavier and Lily practise Cathartic sex like the pagans of 12th-century Languedoc; when they break up, Violet sighs: “Poor Lily – he just used her body, and not even the right side.”
Damsels premiered last fall as the closing film of the Venice Film Festival, followed by a North American premiere at the Toronto film fest. Now it hits theatres in North America and Britain.
The movie – Stillman’s fourth, his comeback from the 1998 commercial flop The Last Days of Disco, which starred Chloë Sevigny – shows his usual talent for snagging young talent. The cast here is led by Gerwig, familiar to fans of the “Mumblecore” movement of indie cinema in films like Hannah Takes the Stairs and Baghead, and to mainstream audiences for comedies like Arthur and No Strings Attached.
There are movie references galore in Damsels. Xavier has a Grand Illusion poster on the wall and Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses on the DVD player. Violet has a Lola Montès poster in her room. Charlie talks of having “a Doctor Zhivago” moment. A depressed student tap dancer is nicknamed “Freak” Astaire, and at the end there’s a big, happy Astaire number (the Gershwin’s Things Are Looking Up), taken from the 1937 musical A Damsel in Distress.
On the down side, some of the accents are a little hard to make out. Rose speaks in a hoity-toity British voice: “gull” for “girl,” “tusks” for “tasks.” Xavier uses expressions like “follow ze paz” when he means “follow the path.” It takes some getting used to. So does the original score (by Mark Suozzo and Adam Schlesinger), which has an early ’60s vibe that’s as delightfully passé as Doris Day.
Before the credits roll, the cast perform the (fictional, created specially for the movie) Sambola!, complete with step-by-step onscreen instructions for the audience. Stillman has said he hopes his hybrid of promenade, tango, cha-cha-cha and open-break moves will be the next dance craze to sweep the nation (and ours, presumably).
That’s a long shot, but hey, in this crazy world, everything is possible.