(click to embiggen) Director Whit Stillman and my girl Greta Gerwig and pretty much the entire delightful cast (yes, adorable Adam Brody was there) of Stillman's new delightful movie Damsels in Distress came out to the Film Society of Lincoln Center last night to show off their daffy sweet little movie. Since we'd only been promised the presence of Stillman, this was an unexpected but awesome treat! Here are a couple of pictures I took:
The Q&A was pretty basic - we learned that Whit hadn't made a movie for fourteen years because he wrote a book based on his last movie The Last Days of Disco that he said nobody cared about and then had a couple of projects that he couldn't get off the ground until this one. The cast all seemed to like each other well enough - they said that dancing lessons, which they had to take for the dancing scenes here in this movie, are a great way to let down your guard and make friends quick, thereby echoing the movie itself.
The movie itself, which is a delight. Exactly what you expect from "A Whit Stillman Movie" but somehow he seems to have gotten slightly less self-serious with age. (I find Metropolitan a little too dry for its own good.) This thing is goofy and awkward, much like the sight of the blessedly anti-dainty Greta Gerwig tap-dancing.
Every chance it gets it purposefully undercuts its own intelligence and takes a moment to go wow, rainbows and bean bag chairs, man. It captured an essence of what I remember college really feeling like, at least for me; one I don't think I've seen a movie much get to before - a hyper-literate moronity finding us glomming onto every whim, making it all up as we go along, pretending we're adults who have a fucking clue when really we're just a few steps away from choking down free doughnuts at the crisis center like they're the first fresh air we've had in weeks.
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