Barcelona Metropolitan Disco

“Faux” News, Limbaugh and the like have become the voices of the conservative movement in the US. But Whit Stillman’s trilogy – albeit now located in the slightly distant past – is an intelligent take on the conservative ethos and a witty riposte to the prejudices of the Left. The first film of the trilogy, Metropolitan, is loosely based on Austen’s Mansfield Park and documents the life and times of the lingering remnants of the "urban haute bourgeoisie". Like Mansfield Park, it is interested in morality and an exposition of the morality occurs by way of numerous conversations and juxtaposition of characters. It is easy to see its characters as upper class twits but Stillman’s films locate the sweetness, the manners and mores of an old, genteel upper class that is slowly fading, indeed the tagline for Metropolitan is “doomed bourgeois in love”. In this world, the word bourgeois (or for that matter preppie) is not a dirty word, it merely indicates a certain decency and rectitude, even perhaps the dignity that David Brooks touched on in a recent NYT article. Stillman further underlines this in Barcelona which has Stillman regulars Eigeman as the loudmouth, obnoxious American and Nichols as the lost, slightly insular and essentially decent American in the eponymous city. The film is slightly meandering and has some clumsy moments but Stillman again makes use of a lot of conversation to provide a glimpse into the perils and otherwise of an American in the world. The movie has a surprisingly hilarious takedown of Anti-Americanism amongst European intellectuals, a sort of antidote to numerous portentous European movies on the US. The Last Days of Disco is probably the weakest of the trilogy and is often simply a nostalgic look back at the dying days of disco culture. But it is full of repartee and humour and both Sevigny and Beckinsale are very good as the good and not so good girl, respectively. With its predecessors, it shares the same features of making an intellectual case for “goodness” and its rewards as it were, in this it runs counter to so many films that document the dysfunctionality of the upper middle classes.

In being so talky and in its constant theme of gently satirising the social and romantic dynamics of the young and comfortably off, Stillman’s films are a lot like Eric Rohmer’s. Rohmer’s oeuvre is substantial unlike Stillmans’s slim output and I am not sure if Rohmer is a social conservative, though I suspect he is. The filmmakers do differ in other ways of course, even though they share the similarity of working with good actors who haven't gone on to commercial success. For one, Rohmer’s films always end with ambiguity, even in a film that looks headed to a straightforward happy ending like An Autumn Tale, Rohmer chooses to end with a character with unresolved feelings. Stillman on the other hand is very much the American optimist, the good get their rewards, the romances end conventionally (Barcelona, for example, is nearly undone by a simplistic ending that rings false).

There are very few Stillman shrines on the Net, this one seems to collate most of the reviews. And a detailed essay here. And a glowing paean to all three films in City Journal, which is a bit of a conservative rag. The films are actually available intermittently yet cheaply in Sydney though I note that Last Days/Metropolitan are expensively priced on Amazon.