Blowhard, Esq. writes:

Like Fabrizio, I recently watched Whit Stillman’s latest mocking eulogy for WASP culture and enjoyed it quite a bit. In the DVD commentary Stillman says the budget and shooting style was like his first film Metropolitan and this movie feels like a continuation of that one. That is, a closed-off fantasy world of dim yet hyper-articulate upper-class East Coast white people who speak in epigrams. Stillman likens the movie to an Archie comic, but I doubt Archie ever used anal sex as a plot point, not even in the oblique way Stillman refers to it here.

At the risk of embarrassing myself, I think one of the reason I love Stillman’s films so much is because they shaped my idea of New York City. Scorsese’s low-life Italians, Woody Allen’s neurotic Jews, and Stillman’s silly WASPs each inhabited a different yet idealized version of the city that I fell for.

This is the first movie I’ve seen starring indie darling Greta Gerwig and I thought she was terrific. A graduate of Barnard, she betrayed no difficulty delivering Stillman’s stylized dialogue, even though during the commentary she says, “I felt like I was swimming with cats.”

Related

• A New York Times profile in which Stillman says he wanted “to write a movie about four girls in a dorm who are trying to keep things civil in an uncivil world.” It took him a year to write 23 pages.
• Here’s an interview with Stillman at Ain’t It Cool News. He’s working on a film about Jamaican music in the 60s.
• According to IMDb, Damsels grossed just over $1 million in the United States. So, probably a good thing that his next film isn’t about preppies.