A press kit appeared on the website for Whit Stillman’s ueber-anticipated new film, Damsels in Distress, and it includes a wise and delightfully modest Director’s Statement that’s worth reprinting here in its entirety. A further clue, perhaps, as to why we keep going on and on about his work:
There’s a saying that the way to end up in the future one wants is to invent it oneself.
It’s hard not to admire the idealists who, not content with the existent world, seek to invent new ones. But the confidence and mastery these future-architects embody often disguise a fragile persona that’s frail, inadaptive and, finally, easily shattered.
In the film the word “tailspin” plays a key role. In aviation, the term evokes the image of a plane in steep dive, nose-first, spiraling [sic] downward. The second, informal usage is “a loss of emotional control sometimes resulting in emotional collapse.”
Just as pilots use steep dives to build speed and regain control, pulling out just before they hit ground, our heroine finds downward velocity reforming her life — but in steep descent one cannot be sure a fatal crash will be avoided.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k54T8oSTJkY&w=600]
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