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"Disco" Catches The Beat.
Whit Stillman's "The Last Days of Disco" comes after "Boogie Nights" and before "54" - as in Studio 54 - and will be remembered as the one with the smartest talk and the best soundtrack. As he made wittily clear in "Metropolitan" and "Barcelona," Stillman's white preppies talk smart and live dumb, especially here, as they try to make irony cover a lack of emotional savvy while they struggle to sort out their lives and stay on the right side of cool. The nameless club's velvet rope is the perfect metaphor for the recent college grads whose self-esteem hinges on getting in. As one hopeful, whose job at an ad agency depends on getting clients into the temple of hipness, says to the club underboss, "If it's a matter of groveling ..."
In "The Last Days of Disco," it's a matter of glibness stretched thin over cluelessness. Stillman has become a master at escalating the laughter by waiting an extra beat and then understating something devastatingly funny, as when someone looks Chris Eigeman's club manager, Des, in the eye and says, "I consider you a person of integrity - except, you know, in the matter of women."
The film is a microcosm of Harvard and Hampshire grads who do drinks, not drugs, and aren't sure how rigorously they should subscribe to the integrity thing. What if thine own self, wonders one of them, is not so good? It's a world where a well-dressed Harvard grad gyrating alongside gold and silver people tries to impress a young woman by solemnly informing her that he collects original editions of Scrooge McDuck comics.
The film's title is to be taken literally. Stillman makes canny use of the resonance between the winding down of the disco era and simultaneously the end of the generational youth the characters are sharing. Not for much longer will it be cool for them to be holding transitional jobs, sharing railroad flats, filling low-level publishing slots. Time is running out. This doesn't have the effect of making them dance more frantically. It freezes them, which makes the comedy funnier. The comedy in Stillman's films is a comedy of stances. It's saved from heartlessness by infrequent - one might almost say carefully meted out - revelations of genuine emotion.
The counterpoint is beautifully embodied in the far from symbiotic relationship between Kate Beckinsale's pert-nosed sophisticate, Charlotte, and Chloe Sevigny's slower but emotionally deeper Alice, her old college roommate. Alice is inured to the putdowns and betrayals Charlotte needs to prop up her own ego. Sevigny's bedroom eyes - compared to Beckinsale's darty glances, looking avidly for the next prospect of advancement - stand her in good stead. At the opposite end of the scale is the wonderful Eigeman's droll yet dim Des, whose problem is not that he's morally unanchored but that he's confused about what he wants, except that he knows he doesn't want a relationship because it would ruin his night life.
They are poor little lambs who have lost their way - admittedly quite a fix to find yourself in if you're a Harvard grad - and they are all, in varying degrees, both touching and funny, often simultaneously. You'd call them the frat pack if it weren't for the sense of isolation each gives off as he or she goes through the motions of group socializing.
Stillman has been accused - as if it's a drawback! - of being too literary a filmmaker. But his film is an oasis of civilized delights in a season that is far from brimful of them. He knows how to lay in just the right undercurrents of vulnerability. He knows how silly his characters can be, yet he embraces them all. And to a soundtrack boasting the likes of Carol Douglas's "Doctor's Orders," Chic's "Le Freak," Blondie's "Heart of Glass," Brenton Wood's "The Oogum Boogum Song," Sister Sledge's "He's the Greatest Dancer," and Don Ray's "Got to Have Loving." Is this stayin' alive, or what?
Jay Carr
Boston Globe
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