Given that “Damsels in Distress” is the first Whit Stillman feature in the 14 years since “The Last Days of Disco” reveled in Studio 54 nostalgia, it’s almost impossible not to wish this essentially amiable project well. Intermittently witty and never exactly tiresome, the tale of four female undergraduates at a onetime women’s school, pledged to prevent campus suicide and improve the hygiene of their brutish male classmates, is genteel lowbrow farce, with musical comedy aspirations.
The movie’s classy, old school credits scream “Woody” even as the presence of Greta Gerwig as the quartet’s ideological leader Violet mutters “mumblecore.” Violet’s posse — Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke), Heather (Carrie MacLemore), and Lily (Analeigh Tipton) — are exceedingly well-bred and hilariously self-important young people. Given their cute floral bouquet of names and acute, exaggerated lady-like sensitivity (Rose in particular is prone to experience “nasal shock syndrome” when a sweaty frat boy passes by), it sometimes seems as though Stillman’s intentions might be a weirdly retro version of Andy Warhol’s 1971 anti-feminist travesty “Women in Revolt,” notable as a vehicle for three comic drag queens. Would that “Damsels” were half so offensive! The requisite toga party is more of a doily soiree; the handsome Greek Revival campus (Sailors’ Snug Harbor on Staten Island) could be out of a “Harold Teen”-era Hollywood college comedy.
That’s the point, I guess, and “Damsels” is not without a certain donnish humor. (One student is writing a paper on “the decline of decadence,” another purports to be an adherent of Catharism and hence bound by religion to the practice of “non-procreative” sex.) Pedantic as well as logorrheic, Violet is a proponent of fighting depression with “tap dance therapy” (evidently the scent of cheap soap is also helpful); her great ambition is to create an international dance craze.
Late in the movie, the recurring Fred and Ginger references reach critical mass with an al fresco ensemble version of the Gershwin Brothers’ “Things Are Looking Up.” This shameless homage to the dreadful Woody Allen musical “Everyone Says I Love You” is actually pretty funny in that, more than any hoofer since Ruby Keeler, Gerwig is prone to look down. Klutziness has its charm but the sound of air escaping from Stillman’s balloon drowns out the Gershwin.
Admired for the naturalism of her non-acting (see A.O. Scott’s “No Method to Her Method”), Gerwig delivers her lines as though playing one of the more dicty characters in an Oscar Micheaux talkie. Still, her often ungainly, impossibly mannered Violet is the most authentic element in “Damsel.” Based on first-hand knowledge, Stillman’s first two features — the exotic prep-and-deb fest “Metropolitan” (1990), and his wry account of yuppie expats “Barcelona” (1994) — had a certain ethnographic interest. Even “The Last Days of Disco” appeared to draw on the filmmaker’s familiarity of haute bourgeois clique formation. But the 60-year-old Harvard man hasn’t a clue when it comes to even imaginary college juniors. If you’re wondering what a 1930s college musical might look like today, check out Damien Chazelle’s “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench,” an insouciant low-budget black-and-white pop bop and tap musical made by a bunch of under or recent grads from Stillman’s alma mater.