by Millie Butler-Gallie
(Metropolitan, 1990)
Whit Stillman’s benign indictment of the young American bourgeoisie is so charmingly executed that, by the end of it, even being held in derision seems like a sophisticated fate.
The first film in the series and of Stillman’s career, 1990’s Metropolitan (currently streaming on MUBI), offers up for our enjoyment (and ridicule) a world filled with preppy girls and tuxedoed boys, earnestly trying to seem older than they really are, towards the close of Manhattan’s debutante season. Travelling almost exclusively by taxi, they hop back and forth between sumptuous ballrooms and elegantly decorated apartments —never, it would appear, to be hassled by their seemingly absent parents. Here they lounge around playing bridge and talking Charles Fourier and Jane Austen, cigarette in one hand and drink in the other. By the end of the night, they are cha-cha chaing around a spacious beige sitting room, blissfully unaware of the irony in their serious discussions of social mobility. The group’s dynamic is somewhat disrupted, however, by the arrival of outsider Tom Townsend (Edward Clements) whose fatal flaw seems to be that he is more petit bourgeois than haut, and can’t afford a proper winter jacket. But Tom can talk the talk and is swiftly adopted into their crew. Once in, Tom’s initial disdain for the privileged class is displaced by the pleasure he takes in their highly aesthetic lifestyle and intellectualism. His hypocrisy is self-evident in the fact that he openly admits to not reading novels at all, instead preferring ‘good literary criticism’. In many ways, he is the biggest pseudo-intellectual of them all, but Stillman’s portrait of him is in no way damning. He simply and sympathetically demonstrates the trials and tribulations of being a teenager trying to find your social footing at the same time as carving your own identity.
(Barcelona, 1994)
The second instalment, Barcelona (1994), sees Stillman leave the ever-self-affirming atmosphere of the Upper East Side to indulge in the comical possibilities provided by the anti-American sentiment present in Spain during the last decade of the Cold War. Here Ted (Taylor Nichols), a Chicago salesman working abroad, is ambushed by the unexpected arrival of his cousin Fred (Chris Eigeman), a naval officer. Their intellectual exhibitionism often fails to leap the language barrier and repeatedly results in confused- looking Spaniards, humorously revealing the failure of such performative language when there is no audience present to lap it up. In bed after a night of romance, Fred queries whether his whole life he has been shaving the wrong way and quickly spirals into an existential crisis, to which his companion can only reply, ‘I think maybe my English is not so good.’ Ted’s own recent failed romance has seen him take a vow of celibacy until he meets the girl he wants to marry, but he is so afraid of how unrelenting Fred’s teasing will be if he finds out that he hides his Bible inside the sleeves of a copy of The Economist — it doesn’t get more bourgeois than that. Although more fast paced than his debut, the allure of Barcelona lies in the brilliance of Stillman’s dialogue.
The trilogy is concluded with The Last Days of Disco (1998), which is set in the early 80s and follows roommates Alice (Chloë Sevingy) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) as they chase budding romances with yuppie salesmen against the backdrop of the dying New York club scene. In between boogieing to Chic’s ‘Everybody Dance’, the group discuss the originality of ordering drinks (apparently a vodka tonic is universally and eternally a basic-bitch drink) and condemn — in all seriousness — the Tramp from The Lady and The Tramp as ‘a self-confessed chicken thief and all-around sleazeball’. The film is a funny and vibrant look at the end of a very specific era; but as with the rest of his trilogy, it captures a charmingly authentic picture of human interaction which transcends its setting.
The endearing earnestness of Stillman’s characters, their delightfully clumsy navigation in society, and their romanticisation of the mundane, mean that if not for our status as voyeurs that allows us to laugh at them, we would almost certainly be laughing along with them. Stillman reminds us in every instance to look at ourselves first:, we may not be as self-aware as we may think.
(The Last Days of Disco, 1998)