Whit Stillman on ‘Damsels in Distress’

Washington-born writer-director Whit Stillman has gained a reputation for making cult classics that seem ripped from the pages of “The Official Preppy Handbook.” His movies have the power to make edgy indie fans marvel at debutante Manhattanites (“Metropolitan,” 1990), laugh along with insecure 20-somethings living abroad (“Barcelona,” 1994), even tap a foot as Ivy League grads shimmy onscreen during 1998’s “Last Days of Disco.”

His much-anticipated return to the big screen after 14 years lands Friday with “Damsels in Distress.” On the surface, this looks like classic Stillman. The setting is a private northeastern college; the characters are young and well-heeled; the witty dialogue comes so fast you need a second viewing. It also features Stillman’s favored plotline of thwarted love.

Yet “Damsels” marks a departure for the filmmaker. Even if Stillman hasn’t dispatched with pearls and blazers, he has severed ties with one longtime companion — reality.

This film is a farce about a group of earnest young women forced to deal with the messiness of college life, including cheating boyfriends, depressed peers and imbecilic fraternity members. Its college students haven’t yet mastered memorizing the colors of the rainbow, the smell of unbathed young men can send characters into a spasmodic “nasal shock syndrome,” and suicidal students fling themselves off two-story Robertson Hall (“not high enough to kill, but high enough to maim,” one character laments). The film culminates with a full-on song-and-dance number to the tune of George Gershwin’s “Things Are Looking Up.”

While this kind of absurdity might not amuse some of the more priggish characters Stillman has invented, it delights the director.

“I love Will Ferrell comedy. I love that innocent, idealistic kind of stupid comedy,” Stillman said while in town from New York for the American Film Institute’s retrospective in his honor last month. “ ‘Animal House’ was always a favorite movie. And without thinking about it, without realizing it, I think that sort of movie that I’d love to make someday came into this script.”

For 14 years, the man who gave the world so many gems of archly comic dialogue promoting bourgeoisie accomplishments has been quiet. His whereabouts were a subject of curiosity at the AFI’s recent sold-out sneak preview of “Damsels,” which was followed by a Q&A with Stillman and the film’s star, increasingly visible indie goddess Greta Gerwig. The writer-director responded with two of his trademarks, deadpan humor and modesty.

“I’m a failure,” he said.

In truth, Stillman has worked on a number of projects over the past decade-plus, many of them free of the typical characters that populate his films. It’s just that none got made, largely because of lack of financing. There was the adaptation of “Red Azalea,” Anchee Min’s memoir about the cultural revolution in China. He was attached to a screen version of Chris Buckley’s “Little Green Men,” as well as a film about the young members of a Jamaican church set against the backdrop of the early 1960s music scene in Kingston.