How about a lovely college campus comedy for the weekend? Just go on to Amazon Prime, you’ll find a free opportunity: Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress (2011). It stars Greta Gerwig, back before she started ruining cinema, when she was young & full of promise. It’s a good cast overall, but it’s an especially good script, without the nonsense typical of liberal movies, but instead full of gentle mockery of the self-importance of young adults, attentive to their confusion, largely free of the sordid. It’s a reminder of a much more elegant America, quietly sophisticated without neglect of serious matters. It’s comedy about the collapse of civilization. I did a podcast on it, with Flagg Taylor & Carl Eric Scott, both admirers of Whit Stillman.
Here’s the trailer:
And see below, https://pomocon.substack.com/p/what-greta-gerwig-meant-to-me for a few quotations from a chapter of mine about it.
Great conversation!
Flagg mentioned a documentary about the twist, which I couldn’t find on YouTube. Does anyone have a link to it?