There’s a scene in Damsels in Distress where a French graduate student uses François Truffaut’s Baisers volés (1968) to seduce an American coed—the implication being that some girls would rather do just about anything than watch an old movie—and like that film, Whit Stillman’s fourth feature is pleasant and diverting but not much more. Greta Gerwig plays the leader of a pack of peppy college girls who volunteer at a campus suicide prevention centre where they use scented soaps and tap dancing to alleviate their classmates’ depression. And since the most serious problems they encounter are breakups, body odor, and constantly being asked if you’re suicidal, their methods are largely successful. In the twenty years since he made his debut with Metropolitan (1990), Stillman hasn’t developed much as a stylist—his static blocking looks especially rudimentary alongside Truffaut’s dynamic staging of actors—or as a storyteller. The plot proceeds in fits and starts and big chunks of the story are barely sketched in (we never learn what most of the characters are studying as the only time anyone goes to class it’s in order to catch a playboy-operator in a lie), but individual scenes are hilarious and the perky cast radiates enough charm to keep one amused throughout.
Les Mistons
Some filmmakers try something different each time out; others like Stillman return to the same subjects and stylistic choices again and again. Wes Anderson has made films set in Texas, India, and now 1960s New England, but they always look like Wes Anderson Movies, full of brightly coloured, symmetrically framed planimetric compositions and deadpan line readings. However, rather than simply repeating himself, Anderson continues to refine and expand his distinctive cinematic vocabulary. In Moonrise Kingdom (2012), some new additions to his usual repertoire are an onscreen narrator (Bob Balaban) who addresses the camera directly, a non-diegetic insert that contradicts what’s being said in the dialogue, and a violent streak that’s all the more shocking in contrast with Anderson’s usual whimsy.
Furthermore, although Anderson has made films about flawed parents and troubled children in the past, the plot of Moonrise Kingdom isn’t merely a retread of The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). The preteen hero, Sam Shukusky (Jared Gilman), is a socially unpopular orphan who runs away from summer camp with his equally maladjusted girlfriend, Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward). It’s implied that the latter is acting out because she knows that her mother, Laura (Frances McDormand), is having an affair with a stoic cop, Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis)—who, unlike Suzy’s father, Walt (Bill Murray), is a real man. (At one point, Walt—stripped to the waist, holding an ax in one hand and a half-empty whisky bottle in the other—announces to his three sons that he’s going to cut down a tree. Why? Because that’s what men are supposed to do.) The somewhat dubious message is that a stable home life would magically solve the kids’ problems, but even if the limitations of Anderson’s style are apparent in spots—compare this film’s unambiguously happy ending with the more open-ended conclusion of Truffaut’s Les Quatre cents coups (1959), a more tough-minded movie about a juvenile delinquent—its charms are full in evidence as well.
The (New) World 