Highly Overrated But Still Good

good back-story, and good acting

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Damsels In DistressSurprisingly it is flat out hilarious and offers the audience their life of the time throughout the course of time and keeps them engaged throughout the course of it by only walking on something that it is so narrow yet is explored in detail with such an elegance and confidence that it is almost impossible not to be effected by it. The screenplay is gripping, thought-provoking and of ironic nature, all along its well edited and of almost 100 minutes. The camera work is utterly beautiful and is shot nicely too but unfortunately is short on other technical aspects especially on sound department. Whit Stillman; the writer-director, has done a tremendous work on executing the anticipated vision on screen by keeping it light and breezy. Greta Gerwig is amazing on her portrayal and is supported well by her cast and the key to that is the chemistry among them which is more convincing than any other thing. Having said that, the feature chews off too much of the subplots of the characters only to make a definite point which the audience can see far before it even hits, which makes it redundant. Damsels In Distress is anything but in distress, as it flaunts itself on a much larger scale; something to think about.

This is a review of "Damsels in Distress" and "The Last Days of Disco", two films by writer/director Whit Stillman.Released in 2011, "Damsels" stars Greta Gerwig as Violet, the leader of a band of young women. As they have been deeply scarred in the past, the girls invent new personas for themselves and attempt to help other wounded people by embarking on various altruistic endeavours. One of their schemes involve "inventing a new form of dance", in which dance becomes akin to a political movement used to spread "togetherness, love and happiness".Stillman's godfather, sociologist E Digby Baltzell, authored "Aristocracy and Caste in America" and helped popularise the term "Wasp". Stillman's films, meanwhile, tend to focus on the haute bourgeoisie, though he's more obsessed with questioning the naive assumptions they hold toward responsibility, culpability and leadership. In this regard, his films are preoccupied with characters whose well intentioned good deeds lead to disasters, or seemingly horrible characters who inadvertently help others. The intentions behind deeds are also examined: is altruism really altruism if it's unconsciously rooted in selfishness? Why do good deeds do damage? And why do the noblest of intentions oft lead to unforeseen disasters? All these questions arise during one subplot in which the girls date boyfriends who are less cool and less intelligent than they are (their intention is to transform the boys into something better). In another subplot, the girls hand out soap to unhygienic male students. Both plans backfire spectacularly, with the soap turned into a weapon/game and the girls' relationships with the guys having less to do with reformation than their own personal insecurities and hangups. The film then ends with our heroes dancing to "Things are looking up", originally sung by Fred Astaire in the 1937 film "A Damsel In Distress".Stillman was born into a very politically active, radically left-wing family. Many critics tout him as being one of the few "intellectual conservative directors", whilst others see his films as being reactionary responses to his parental upbringing. This is, after all, a guy whose films are often about "vindictiveness and self-centeredness unintentionally benefiting others" and "well-intentioned meddling causing damage", which is of course the credo of many far right groups. But Stillman really embodies a postmodern scepticism regarding both the political left and right. "When you're an egoist, none of the harm you do is intentional," characters in his earlier pictures state. And later: "Today barbarism is cloaked with self-righteousness and moral superiority." Elsewhere he has characters defending conservative values (marriage, monogamy etc) because, though they're simply rooted in "ritualistically enforced behaviour", such behaviour was itself "once deemed unconventional but has been adopted because it works for society". This argument is of course true, but also wrong in many instances. Stillman's films tend to present both sides of the coin.These contradictions become most apparent in Stillman's "The Last Days of Disco". Set in the mid 1980s, "Disco" centres on a group of articulate urbanites. They're descendants of wealth, but have a hard time making ends meet. This at first seems like an apologia for the upper middle classes, until various mouthpieces in the film mock the "troubles" of our cast, even as Stillman sympathises with them.The film then watches as the college graduates of the Me Generation set about co-opting disco trends and the totems of the sexual revolution. The "openness" of these social movements, however, quickly gets perverted into an arena of exclusivity, money, rules and regulations. The result is the creation of a false elite: those cool, attractive or pushy enough to get into the clubs and those willing to subject themselves to the club's arbitrary, superficial and capricious rules.The film then contrasts two characters. One's Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale), who's elegant, sophisticated, and always unintentionally harming others with her needle-like tongue. The other's Alice (Chloë Sevigny), a quietly sensitive woman who has no idea what the sexual revolution means for people like her. Acting free and sexy gets her stigmatised as a whore, whilst acting bookish and intellectual gets her stigmatised a prude. The disco dance floors epitomise this new sexual minefield, where there are no known steps, no clear partners, where attentions constantly shift, where no one touches for long, yet where there seemingly exists no boundaries."Control your own destiny. Don't wait for guys to call." Charlotte says, which is your typical Stillman "fact", in that its conservative counterpoint is then shown to be also true. Infinite choice has its own problems and self expression need not be free but a product of influence.Interestingly, Alice embodies a modernist sensibility. She has standards, values and is constantly judging and categorising. Charlotte embodies a postmodern subjectivity, which, of course, is couched in a aura of "nonjudgementality", in which its deemed okay to insult and criticise because what's said is always just a "silly personal opinion" anyway. Charlotte's lines frequently highlight this contradiction: "People hate being criticised" she says, before complaining that Alice was "too moralistic and judgemental in college". Later Alice sleeps with a character called Tom, who promptly ditches her when Alice follows Charlote's advice to become a sexual predator. "I crave sentient individuals who don't abandon their principles," Tom says, disgusted with the cheapening of romance and relations, whilst, ironically, sticking to modern conventions of "openness" with these lacerating speeches (and it is he who gives her a STD!). "I'm beginning to think," Alice later says, "that maybe the old system of people getting married based on mutual respect and shared aspirations, and slowly, over time, earning each other's love and admiration, worked the best." For Stillman, mores, commitments, values and manners have everything to do with what distinguishes us as human, they're just very fickle, unreliable things.8/10 - Worth one viewing.

I found this perfectly gauged trifle a delight, a deadpan satire which deliberately keeps its targets muted, the four main characters not unlike something one might find in an 18th Century drawing room, chatting about inconsequentials, but in their own way attempting to drag some significance from a trivial life. How refreshing to see a film with young twenty-somethings not having to express themselves with solely with four-letter words or the dreaded "awesome" because they lack imagination; these folks actually have vocabularies! While no masterpiece by any means, this is a gentle look at maturation, a lightly barbed look at young women that keeps its claws drawn in

"Damsels in Distress" lives in a world utterly of its own making, and you're either going to accept that world or you're not. I was won over and found this film to be a charming, eccentric movie about a group of college girls, and one in particular, who hide their insecurities behind a confident desire to better their fellow students.Greta Gerwig is the leader of the pack, a somewhat annoying girl who also remains rather winning and appealing thanks to Gerwig's terrific performance. The film reminded me somewhat of another movie released this year, Wes Anderson's "Moonrise Kingdom" (though that's a far better film) in its quirky determination to stick to the rules it erects for itself, but also in its tone and its assembled cast of characters who are all basically good people trying to make sense of a frequently confusing and not always very pleasant world."Damsels in Distress" is not going to be to everyone's taste, but, also like "Moonrise Kingdom," if it is to your taste you'll probably be delighted by it.Grade: A-