It’s as though Stillman is deliberately resisting the urge to be historical.
I’m sure we’re gonna get in”), places events vaguely in “the very early 1980s”. The title sequence, playing out to the tune of Carol Douglas’s “Doctor’s Orders” as Charlotte and Alice approach the nightclub (“We look really good tonight. That is to say, ‘life’ in the sense of the painful inbetweenness of one’s 20s. The characters are flawed, their career progression shaky, and their living situation “a little awkward”: in part because, as Alice sagely notes to Charlotte, not only do they barely know one another, it’s hard to say whether they even like each other.Īwkwardness is a good word to describe the movie’s main concern. Young people falling in and out of one another’s purviews, desperate to figure out where – or with whom – they are to fit in, is ultimately what makes the film so true to life. Charlotte and Alice, working low-paid jobs in book publishing by day, live for the night time, hoping to find romance with a motley crew of Harvard alums. A tale of knowing when to go out, and maybe not knowing when to stay in, it perfectly captures that universal aimlessness in life and love that occurs in the years immediately after graduation. The Last Days of Disco tells the story of friends and recent college graduates Charlotte and Alice (played by Kate Beckinsale and Chloë Sevigny respectively), the local disco they frequent every weekend, and the men they meet there.
Of all those films, it is 1998’s The Last Days of Disco whose youth-culture appeal spans several generations, something evidenced by the overwhelming turnout of fanatics at the recent screening organised by the Barbican Young Programmers, which brought Stillman to town and saw him in conversation with fellow cinematic singularist Richard Ayoade. In Stillman’s small but perfectly-formed body of work – low-budget breakthrough hit Metropolitan(1990), Barcelona(1994), Damsels in Distress (2011), and the upcoming Love & Friendship – the lies that young people tell themselves as they get older is a recurring theme. As the director himself says of his distinctive cinematic world, it’s simply “one version of authentic things”. But with Stillman in town to discuss what is probably his glitziest film, The Last Days of Disco, it seems apt to imagine our surroundings as a starrier production than they actually are. And sure, the conversations in earshot hardly suggest incisive pop-cultural critique on the level of the director’s typical witty coteries. So we might in fact be sitting in the home of set meals-for-Francophiles, Côte Brasserie. Stillman highlights the political stakes of personal pleasures with archival clips showing the infamous 1979 Disco Demolition Night, at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, which devolved into a riot led mainly by young white men.As I set my dictaphone down on a marble table and am offered a coffee by a French waiter, I realise my first conversation with Whit Stillman – the creative mind behind some of cinema’s chicest milieus – is looking as stylish as I always imagined it would. Their circle of men includes an environmental lawyer (Robert Sean Leonard), an adman (Mackenzie Astin), a colleague (Matt Ross), a club employee (Chris Eigeman), and the group’s unofficial philosopher, a fledgling prosecutor named Josh (Matt Keeslar) who naïvely hails the disco scene for its “cocktails, dancing, conversation, exchange of ideas and points of view.” In the disco, talking is a meeting of the minds, and dancing is a meeting of the bodies-sex without contact, an egalitarian indicator of erotic compatibility-yet these young socialites’ emotional relationships involve cruelly deceitful games that are inextricably based on the bedrock standard of the bottom line.
Set in Manhattan in the early eighties, the film stars Chloë Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale as recent college graduates and editorial assistants whose social life is centered on a flashy and exclusive night club. In this deftly dialectical and bitterly intimate comedy, from 1998, Whit Stillman unfolds disco’s vectors of power with a historian’s insight and a novelist’s eye for satirical nuance.