The Soul of Whit
Things I look out for in gathering material for a blog post: sketch
groups busy ‘reinventing the genre’;[i]
up-and-coming stand-ups about to squander their promise in something awful on
BBC3; funny females and/or articles denying there could ever be such a thing
(anything to chase ever-elusive publicity); and writers or performers with a
distinctive style. The last category is sparsely populated - it’s a tough job
being either funny or distinctive, let alone both.
Step forward Whit Stillman, American auteur and purveyor of the
sort of low-energy satire for which the adjective ‘sly’ should have been
coined. If you haven’t seen any of his work, think of him as a sort of goyish
Woody Allen with fewer zingers, or a less geeky Wes Anderson. These comparisons
place him fairly accurately as regards the class of his characters, and his nostalgic
aesthetic; they also hint at his humour without really summing it up.
Stillman’s characters want, in a self-conscious fashion, to change
the world. His is a universe where you can barely move for bumping into chunks
of ideology: decorum, etiquette and Catharism are among the causes spoken up
for in his latest film (and first for thirteen years), Damsels in Distress.
For a film which is nominally a comedy, it is noticeable how few attempts at
humour any of the characters make. Everyone is in earnest here, which can
become tiresome but is also the key to the film’s charm. What makes Stillman’s sense
of humour so distinctive is how none of his characters are played for laughs.
They are naïve, for the most part – though the Cathar turns out to have a
hidden agenda – but the film indulges them; they may lose in love or life, they
may lose their innocence, but they never lose their belief.
I can imagine this being highly irritating to someone who doesn’t
buy into Stillman’s conceit. A lot of what we see seems misguided or downright
irrelevant, and the determinately non-judgemental approach taken towards it
might come across as precious, a celebration of difference for its own sake. I
can sympathise with criticisms of this sort, but I can’t help but feel that
they are missing the point somewhat. Stillman isn’t presenting these characters
as rebukes to the cynicism of our sullied age, but as studies of people with a
very particular set of attitudes towards the past and the present. The humour comes
from the incompatibility between their beliefs and the real world, but the joke
is on neither them nor us; the joke is our mutual incomprehension. Violet and
her companions, ceaselessly trying to drag the male students of Sevenoaks
University into an age of innocence or at least one of personal grooming, are
ridiculous, but they are not laughable, no more than we would be for ignoring
what they get so worked up over.
The obvious danger with this approach is a lack of bite or
sharpness in the writing, something compounded in Damsels in Distress by
the slow-moving plot. Whitman, it has been observed, makes comedies of manners,
but at times his comedy is too mannered for its own good. This is why, for all
that I find his films intriguing, I can never enjoy them as much as I would
like. Whether this is Stillman’s fault or my own is, of course, another matter.
