The splendid new movie by Whit Stillman, Damsels in
Distress, begins with a musical allusion to “Gaudeamus
Igitur,” the medieval student song that formed a leading motif of
Brahms’s “Academic Festival Overture” and is still sung in some
European universities today. The song’s real name is De
Brevitate Vitae and it begins like this:
Gaudeamus igitur,
Iuvenes dum sumus;
Post iucundam
iuventutem,
Post molestam senectutem
Nos habebit humus.
[Let us therefore rejoice,
While we are young;
After our joyous
youth,
After an irksome old age,
The earth will have us.]
You can hear Mario Lanza singing it, with male voice chorus, in
a version from the 1954 movie of The Student Prince
here. He
and the boys only sing the first verse, but it is enough to remind
us of the point of the word igitur, or “therefore.” Life
is short, therefore we should rejoice — and youthful
rejoicing gains both in joy and poignancy from a glance forward to
life’s melancholy terminus.
Vita nostra brevis est,
Brevi finietur;
Venit mors
velociter,
Rapit nos atrociter;
Nemini parcetur.
[Our life is brief
And will shortly end;
Death comes
quickly,
And cruelly seizes us;
No one is spared.]
It’s helpful to keep these words in mind in order to gain some
perspective on the film’s center of interest, the Suicide
Prevention Center at fashionable Seven Oaks College, whose joyless
clients are tempted to think life too long rather than too short.
Their neuroses are ministered to there by Violet (Greta Gerwig) as
the leader of a group of girls with high ideals about what the
social life of young people should be, whose therapeutic methods
consist of doughnuts and dancing. It’s not quite what those
medieval students had in mind, I’m guessing, but the purpose is the
same in the end. And the idea of iucundam iuventutem
promulgated by Violet and her floral-themed companions Rose
(Megalyn Echikunwoke), Heather (Carrie MacLemore) and Lily
(Analeigh Tipton) is better suited to today’s co-ed campuses.
Mr. Stillman offered a similar note of musical perspective at
the beginning of his first film, Metropolitan (1990), with
a snatch of the Lutheran hymn “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” —
which, like that film’s packed church at Christmas-time, contrasted
with the cold, dying (or, for his purposes, comically “doomed”)
world outside it. Both allusions to a distant and ghostly past are
meant, I take it, to place their respective films’ events in time
at the end of a long process of Christian civilization for which
Mr. Stillman and his fans (of which I am emphatically one) have a
nostalgic attraction. Yet in both, as in his other two movies,
Barcelona (1994) and The
Last Days of Disco (1998), he has always managed to keep
in some kind of equilibrium feelings of sadness this side of
despair at the passing away of that civilization — and especially
the elegance and sophistication of its final phases — and optimism
at the prospects for renewal of the same in some not altogether
dissimilar form such as disco.
As Last Days was set at the sad end of an old dance
craze, Damsels is set at the hopeful beginning of a new
one, the one which it is Violet’s ambition to start with something
called the Sambola, or “the devil’s dance.” If so, it’s an ironic
sort of devil, as all the film’s devils are, more or less. Even
Rick DeWolfe (Zach Woods), editor of the college newspaper (The
Daily Complainer) and the guy set up to be either the
principal villain or Violet’s improbable love interest, or both,
simply fades from view after an initial, inconclusive confrontation
with Violet and the girls. Perhaps he is dumbfounded by the girls
and what Violet calls “a form of youth outreach” to the immature
guys of Seven Oaks — guys who are said to be “crying out for help
and guidance” to these exotic emissaries on behalf of unashamed
femininity and an almost forgotten standard of chivalry and
civilization.
For this is a campus where, as on most campuses these days, “an
atmosphere of male barbarism predominates.” So at least we are
told. But just as the devil is not very devilish, neither is the
barbarism very barbaric. What we see of it at Seven Oaks is as
fantastical as the female mission civilisatrice to
eradicate it, and it occurs principally in the movie’s peripheral
vision. For the most part, though they are much stupider than the
girls, the boys are as well-behaved, and both are impossibly
decorous by the standards of today’s college campuses, even though
the film’s time period is meant to seem vaguely contemporary. The
girls all wear party dresses, while the boys are all in jackets and
some even wear ties, as they dance at a fraternity party amidst
only moderate and strictly alcoholic revelry. Clearly, though there
may be much work for the girls to do, their seed is not going to
fall on barren ground.
Violet advises the others to emulate her in choosing as a
boyfriend “someone frankly inferior to yourself,” and they don’t
come much more inferior than her Frank (Ryan Metcalf) who, if more
presentable than most of his real-life counterparts, is less
articulate or mentally gifted. Another and one of the more
tantalizing of Violet’s pronunciamentos is that “this obsession
with intelligence” must be overcome, as “we can love someone
without intelligence.” Frank and his fraternity brother (the
fraternities at Seven Oaks are Roman rather than Greek letter
houses) Thor (Billy Magnussen) are obvious examples of the lovably
unintelligent, but they never quite succeed in dragging the frankly
fantastical world of Seven Oaks back into the word as we know it in
which girls like these really do face a growing disparity between
male and female achievement to dim their marriage prospects.
Perhaps this is for the best.
In promoting her international dance “craze” — the very word is
redolent of a more innocent time — Violet’s purpose is not to win
celebrity or riches for herself but to give the world’s youth
something she believes they desperately need, which is a basis for
social life and courtship that is positive and joyous and not
self-destructive. When Frank lets Violet down, sending her into a
“tailspin” — a term which she uses to distinguish herself from the
depressive clients at the Suicide Prevention Center — she has to
go away like a chivalric hero of old to rediscover her mission in
the form of a bar of complimentary but sweet-smelling soap at a
cheap motel. That she returns to love and dancing is as satisfying
as it is inevitable. As Violet herself says: “I love clichés —
because they are mostly true. They represent a treasure of human
knowledge.”
The paradox is of course that this is anything but a clichéic
thing for her — or anyone — to say. The movie’s clichés are
likewise made fresh with constant surprise and delight. There are
hints of a darker subtext as both Violet and Rose are said to be
not who they seem to be, but it is hard to see self-invention as
anything more than the logical culmination of the self-improvement
that Violet is always striving for. When Lily points out that
Violet’s charge of “arrogance” against Rick DeWolfe could also be
applied to herself, she answers: “We are all flawed. Must that
render us mute to the flaws of others?” Generally she is quick to
agree with those pointing out her own flaws, which proves a
disarming tactic to the other girls. Thus when Lily accuses her of
being nosy, she replies: “I was being nosy. I have got to
watch that.”
Such education as there is at Seven Oaks is mostly of this kind.
Violet is interested in another boy, variously known as Charlie or
Fred (Adam Brody), who likewise sees the learning process as more
or less identical with the process of self-invention. And what
better purpose, after all, could academic learning offer them?
Charlie/Fred’s paper for “Flit Lit” or the “Dandyism in Literature”
course taught by Professor Ryan (that old Stillman standby Taylor
Nichols in an uncredited role) is on “The Decline of Decadence,”
and some such title could also be applied to Damsels in
Distress. It is a typically Stillmanian paradox, but it also
holds out a perverse but hopeful prospect of renewal and rebirth
arising out of the near despair to which young folks today so often
seem to be pushed by the impoverished culture they have inherited
from their elders. Oh, that it might be true!
