In Which Whit Stillman Remakes Metropolitan For Some Reason

Lady Susan

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Love & Friendship
dir. Whit Stillman
93 minutes

Whit Stillman is always saying things he half means. "In terms of almost everything, I think it’s a superior time, for music, architecture, manners, thought," he told an interviewer about the 18th century. What he actually is trying to say is this: "Now is terrible. Why now? Why is this now?"

During one scene in Love & Friendship, a character named Frederica (Morfydd Clark) sits in a parlor and reads a book, a collection by the English poet Cowper. Her suitor approaches and can't believe his eyes. "You read both verse and poetry," he gawps. This is not a superior moment. In 1990, which was also not the best year, Whit Stillman made Metropolitan, and for the next quarter century he has tried to remake it five times, with less and less fidelity.

You see, Stillman had a set of satirical observations about the world and the society in which he grew up (prep school, Harvard, etc). It is to his credit that these were not positive impressions, but it is to his detriment that he never developed any other observations. Now in his 60s, he continues to set the basic story of Metropolitan in a variety of settings: once he even wanted to do Metropolitan in Jamaica! The general undercurrent is usually the same; it is no accident that Stillman mentions the superior manners of the late 18th century, because he has always been obsessed with bad manners.

Jane Austen shared this passion, but unlike Stillman, she felt the need to explain what good ones were. Lady Susan Vernon (a weirdly tan Kate Beckinsale) is one of Austen's great characters – a woman so intrisically diabolical that when she walks into a room the inhabitants shudder. At the beginning of Love & Friendship she has no money, she has one friend and her daughter has no husband or future. By the end, this situation is completely corrected.

Austen found Lady Susan as detestable as some of the other characters in the milieu, but to Stillman's great credit, he sees her as the heroine. She takes an interest in the younger brother of her sister-in-law Catherine (rising star Emma Greenwell), but abandons her plan when the family objects to the merger. She is deeply in love with a married man, a certain Lord Manwaring (Lochlann O'Mearáin, who does not have a single line), who has an obstreperous wife. After they separate, she keeps him around even though he has no money, and marries a man who can get along with them both.

Beginning in 1998's The Last Days of Disco, Stillman saw something in Kate Beckinsale that other directors have struggled to extract from her performances. She projects an aura of genuine feeling at all times that allows us to relate to her despite her varying behavior, even as her availability vacillates between unlikely and impossible. Her sexuality has altered slightly as she enters middle age. Whereas before there was the sense that she might have been preserved in amber, now we verifiably know she has been in the shit. I believe she dated Michael Sheen for quite some time.

Stillman's favorite actress remains Chloe Sevigny, who probably has a good thirty years of playing Ellen Burstyn-esque roles ahead of her. Both actresses excel at the Stillman banter, which is best described in this fashion: one woman makes an observation, the other woman agrees, the first woman demurs, the second woman demurs, accommodation is reached. At times the patter goes a bit quickly, but the writing is so much better than Stillman's brief, insanely boring Amazon pilot that we are just glad he is having fun again.

Hidden behind the incredibly amusing dialogue is a more meaningful story, one that expresses the kind of feeling a mother has for her daughter. Metropolitan itself became quite moving at times, and these are the moments where Stillman himself seems surprised at the depth of his creations: that they almost have their own agency. It is just as inevitable, however, that he becomes appalled by their transparency, as in his 2011's Damsels in Distress, so it is probably for the best that Love & Friendship ends after 90 minutes.

The problem with Austen, and to be honest the 18th century in general, is that it was a real dead end. To see men and women relating to each other in such a dishonest fashion is actually a bit jarring. Stillman draws particular attention to the misogyny of the period, and it is this view which persuades us that he believes the 18th century is no better than any other. He is forced to conclude there is really no special time and place to be a part of, unless you were gay and in Berlin before the war. That was not to be missed.

Allowing for his critical observations of the time period, Stillman finally seems to be enjoying himself at all times. Love & Friendship, besides being completely hysterical and the best comedy this year, unfolds its enthusiasms over even the simplest scenes. Stillman is a fantastic editor of Austen, a fact he openly admits, since he rewrote the epistolary version of Lady Susan into his own novel. If only he were this excited about tomorrow.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

In Which We Take Anyone Who Speaks Our Language

Good Americans

by KARA VANDERBIJL

The Cosmopolitans
creator Whit Stillman

Aubrey (Carrie MacLemore) is having a rough day. Her bedheaded French boyfriend, for whom she recently left Alabama to live in Paris, has banished her to the maid’s quarters. When he tells her that she can’t use the kitchen in his place anymore, either, she straps on a pair of heels and trudges along the Seine.

But that’s not the worst of it, because Aubrey is about to sit down at a sidewalk cafe with the only people in Paris who are more deplorable than her boyfriend: Hal (Jordan Rountree) and Jimmy (Adam Brody), fellow American expats who lounge around, complaining about French women.

And that’s about all there is to say about The Cosmopolitans. Oscar Wilde once said that good Americans go to Paris when they die, but according to Stillman, you’ve just got to be bored. Paris is the bright pair of shoes or the clever joke you bring to a party to differentiate yourself from everybody else, a word that means nothing anymore except for culture, pleasure, and wealth.

Hal, Jimmy and Aubrey have come to Paris in search of friendship and romance, which, even after watching the pilot, is still the only thing we know about any of them. They have no jobs, no roots, no ambitions: they flit from cafe to house party, glass of wine in hand, seemingly directionless.

Watching them is a little bit like trying to find your way around a foreign city at night when you’ve just spent the past twenty hours on an airplane, not sleeping. You want something to fall from the sky into your lap, like a plotline, or perhaps a conflict, or maybe a free pizza. You want somebody to come up to you and speak in English and lead you to your bed, where you will be able to dream of jokes that are actually funny and dialogue that actually sounds like people speaking to one another.

Expatriatism is all about imagination. We wouldn’t travel at all if visiting other lands didn’t mean exploring the alternate facets of our own personalities. Immature travelers spend most of their time differentiating their new experiences from ones they’re familiar with, asking, “Why isn’t this like what I’m used to?” These people are incapable of imagining the world, or themselves, differently. Seasoned expatriates create a third culture in which aspects of both their native surroundings and their new ones are integrated.

Aubrey, the token fish-out-of-water, is meant to lure us into Hal, Jimmy and Sandro’s territory, the third culture that they’ve created. Normally it’d be hard to believe that a woman on her own in a foreign country would comfortably sit with three strange guys at a sidewalk cafe. These things seem to happen naturally when you’re abroad: it’s like your ears have been fine-tuned to hear your language from hundreds of yards away, that you’ve been outfitted with an internal GPS that leads you to others like yourself.

Still, it’s Aubrey’s willingness to hang out with them that propels The Cosmopolitans into the far reaches of fantasy. Within a few minutes, Hal, Jimmy, and Sandro insult her drink order (sangria) and launch a smear campaign against Hal’s ex, Clemence, who, for all intents and purposes, seemed like a pretty decent person, just not into weird entitled creeps like Hal who are only capable of one facial expression.

Aubrey can’t see these red flags because she’s still convinced that her bedhead boyfriend wants to be with her. Perhaps she believes she’s living inside Beauty and the Beast.

It’s a pity because Adam Brody, of The O.C. fame, is genuinely funny, and he brings his open Seth Cohen face to this role. Unfortunately, this only serves to make the other characters, especially Hal, look like stock photography someone from Yale might use in an admissions brochure.

Of course, one might concede that in a foreign country, when you’ve just been dumped by your beast of a boyfriend and you’re all alone, you’ll take anyone who speaks your language or shows a sign of friendliness. In which case I’d like to tell Aubrey and anybody else considering this as a new fall show: stick to singing candlesticks and talking clocks. The Cosmopolitans may look good, but really, it’s positively primeval. Plus, Gilmore Girls just landed on Netflix.

Kara VanderBijl is the managing editor of This Recording.

"Hard To Love" - The Drums (mp3)

"If He Likes It Let Him Do It" - The Drums (mp3)

In Which Whit Stillman Is Overly Familiar

Marbled Wonderland

by SARAH LABRIE

Damsels in Distress
dir. Whit Stillman
97 minutes

People like to give Whit Stillman a hard time for making movies about rich people who only care about themselves, but really he makes movies about rich people who care a lot about bad dancing. Metropolitan, Last Days of Disco and Barcelona all promote terrible dancing in public as a therapeutic pastime. Damsels in Distress — Stillman’s first feature in more than a decade — is also his first to elevate the bad dancing/therapy dichotomy to a cure for all life’s social ills. I, for one, came away convinced.

Damsel’s heroine Violet Wister (Greta Gerwig) dreams of “changing the course of human history” by inventing an international dance craze. In off hours she tries to reform the Roman Letter Clubs (Stillman’s version of frats) of Seven Oaks College by showing up at their parties and waving her arms around. She’s a junior, I think, but she doesn’t ever talk about summer internships or studying abroad. She’s sacrificed a four-year education for loftier ambitions, like the prevention of suicide in the student body’s depressive population through tap.

With her normal-person body, gargantuan smile and eyebrows that don’t match her hair, Gerwig’s Violet is hard not to love. She’s the least movie-star-pretty girl in her posse of ladies, which means, of course, she is the leader. Her sidekicks, Rose and Heather glitter like they got lost on the way to a Gossip Girl shoot but they turn up mostly to protect Violet’s ego, along with the free donut box at the suicide prevention center where she volunteers.

Part of the reason we love Violet is that she fails and fails again. Nobody shows up for the premiere of her international dance craze, and in spite of her best efforts, students keep jumping off buildings. Still, she never so much as doubts herself and for this, she deserves a spot among the Katniss Everdeens and Lisbeth Salanders of the season, if not a throne in movie heaven next to Tracy Flick.

We all know people who claw through life cheerfully deluded, but oftentimes when these people show up in movies, they have penises. Violet has floral silk dresses and a Kate Spade full of good intentions. In the same way Young Adult gave us a female lead who, over the course of a two-hour film, didn’t learn anything or change, Stillman gives us Violet Wister and her all-consuming dedication to beautiful things that don’t matter.

If the whole set-up sounds twee, know that on screen Violet’s perspective comes off as darkly nihilistic. She wants to live in imaginary universe free of aggression, hostility, stupid nicknames, body odor, porn, politics, history or the Internet — a marbled, antiseptic female wonderland where perfume and a pastel dress code are strictly enforced. “In some ways, it is distinctly Whit Stillman,” Gerwig said in an interview, “but in other ways, it’s totally — it’s like an alien made it. But in a good, interesting way.”

Opposite Violet, we get Lily (Analeigh Tipton), a new student at Seven Oaks with baby deer eyes and a teensy-tiny head. We know right away Lily is trouble because she doesn’t wear dresses and she refuses Violet’s offer of a makeover. At first Stillman tries to pit Lily and Violet against each other but Violet doesn’t stand for negativity. Lily calls Violet arrogant and Violet thanks her for her “chastisement”. Lily calls Violet nosy and Violet vows to improve herself. Lily calls Violet crazy and Violet agrees. Lily calls Violet’s boyfriend Frank, “a moron,” and Violet tells her she’s being “a bit harsh.”

Over the course of Damsels, nothing changes, nobody yells at anyone, and nobody makes any decisions. In the end, the whole cast dances and then dances some more. Also, a frat boy who can’t name his colors sees a rainbow. I left the theater thinking, “Nothing as amazing as watching that movie is going to happen to me all year.” (Also: “Why isn’t Adam Brody in more things?”)

Seeing Greta Gerwig in Stillman’s shiny snow-globe of a universe is off-putting. So is watching her recite his blueblood-inflected dialogue. Gerwig got her start in grimy no-budget festival movies like Hannah Takes the Stairs and Nights and Weekends. (In Hannah she plays the trumpet naked in a bathtub with Kent Osborne and in Nights she has actual sex with Joe Swanberg on the floor.) Neither feature required her to memorize lines or finish sentences. Her presence in this film, at first, feels like a calculated wink to moviegoers who knew who Gerwig was before Greenberg. Probably, it is. Supporting actors include Alia Shawkat of Arrested Development, Aubrey Plaza from Parks and Recreation, Caitlin Fitzgerald and Hugo Becker of Gossip Girl, Zach Schwartz from The Office and Brody who will never need his credits listed. A consulting producer is Alicia Van Couvering who also produced Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture and Nobody Walks. Dunham was supposed to be in Damsels as was Chris Eigeman, but they both dropped out to do the Girls pilot.

Casting these actors helps Stillman prove he’s still hip in all his premeditated unhipness. It also meant he didn’t have to pay anybody movie star asking prices. Thanks to Damsels’ small budget, Stillman doesn’t need to pander to anybody to make his money back. He can include his weirdo P.G. Wodehouse dialogue and not cater to anybody’s narrative expectations but his own.

Untrammeled freedom isn’t always a good thing though, and parts of Damsels are genuinely bad. One of the damsels can’t act at all, and only one of the frat boys can. Some lines landed on the audience not so much with a thud as with the nervous through-the-nose exhale people reserve for New Yorker cartoons, or unfunny friends whose feelings they don’t want to hurt. “What was that?” asked the woman behind me as the credits rolled. “Whose idea was that movie?”

She probably wasn’t the only person who felt that way. One major critique I imagined coming out in reviews is that it’s tone-deaf to politics. The world the Damsels live in looks more like the Clueless era than this modern age of scrambling economics majors and unemployed law school graduates. But just because an agenda isn’t timely doesn’t mean it’s not relevant. What people who rail against the film’s superficial materialism are missing is that a major theme of Damsels is the decline of decadence. Adam Brody writes a paper on the topic and Violet and her posse attend a drunken frat boy bacchanal.

Perched on top of a rock situated high above the brawling mass of oafs, animals, spilled beer and toilet paper, Violet muses, “This is what happens when decadence infiltrates a society from within… such a society is destined to be overrun. Maybe that’s a good thing.” For all her oblivious insanity, you’d be hard pressed to argue she’s not making a valid point.

Sarah LaBrie is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Jennifer Egan. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"At the Table of the Styx" - Will Stratton (mp3)

"If You Wait Long Enough" - Will Stratton (mp3)

The latest album from Will Stratton, Post-Empire, was released on February 12th.