HE IS BACK

A.O. Scott in the NYT :
Most of the characters in Whit Stillman’s “Damsels in Distress”— the principal damsels, for sure, and also some of the lads identified in the opening titles as “their distress” — speak in complete sentences and express complex, sometimes startlingly original ideas. This, friends, is news: a movie populated by young people who do not mumble, swear, punctuate their utterances with “like” or think that an incredulous “really?” represents the apogee of wit. Even if it did not have other charms, this peculiar, uneven campus comedy would be worth seeing for the delightful felicity of its dialogue. 
 Mr. Stillman, who is 60, might be accused of idealizing some of the student body of Seven Oaks College, a venerable, prestigious and imaginary institution, but he is wholly innocent of the greater sin of condescension. The manners and morals of fledgling members of the privileged class have always interested this director, who made three sweet, astringent comedies in the 1990s before receding into a much remarked-upon, now thankfully concluded, obscurity. 
 His first film, “Metropolitan” (1990), was set in the vestigial but still vigorous world of oldish New York money (the “urban haute bourgeoisie,” as one earnest preppy memorably puts it). That was followed by “Barcelona” (1994) and “The Last Days of Disco” (1998), which pursued the same kind of articulate, self-conscious, well-bred people into the strange worlds of Spain and Manhattan nightlife. 
 You could say that 22 years after his debut and 14 years after “Disco,” he has come full circle, returning to the romantic travails of ruling-class late adolescence. But the world has changed — perhaps more than some of us have realized — and “Damsels in Distress” is remarkable for feeling both exquisitely observant and completely untethered to any recognizable social reality.
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