Reviews

Characters, film make all the right moves

((3 1/2 stars) "The Last Days of Disco" is about people who would like to belong to the kinds of clubs that would accept them as members. It takes place in "the very early 1980s" in Manhattan, where a group of young, good-looking Ivy League graduates dance the night away in discos. Unlike the characters in "Saturday Night Fever," who were basically just looking for a good time, these upwardly mobile characters are alert to the markers of social status. New York magazine is their textbook, and being admitted to the right clubs is the passing grade.

The movie is the latest sociological romance by Whit Stillman ("Metropolitan," "Barcelona"), who nails his characters with perfectly heard dialogue and laconic satire. His characters went to good schools, have good jobs and think they're smarter than they are. "Alice, one of the things I've noticed is that people hate being criticized," says Charlotte, who seems quietly proud of this wisdom. They are capable of keeping a straight face while describing themselves as "adherents to the disco movement."

Alice (Chloe Sevigny, from "Kids") is the smartest member of the crowd, and definitely the nicest. She has values. Her best friend Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) only has goals: to meet the right guys, to be popular, to do exactly what she imagines someone in her position should be doing. Both girls are regulars at a fashionable disco. Charlotte is forever giving poor Alice advice about what to say and how to behave; she says guys like it when a girl uses the word "sexy," and a few nights later, when a guy tells Alice he collects first editions of Scrooge McDuck comic books, she faithfully observes that she has always found Uncle Scrooge sexy.

As the movie opens, a junior ad executive named Jimmy Steinway (Mackenzie Astin) has just failed to get his boss into the club (he was wearing a brown suit). Jimmy goes in anyway. Alice and Charlotte, working as a team (Charlotte is the coach), forcibly introduce themselves. During the opening scenes we meet other regulars, including Des (Christopher Eigeman), the floor manager, who gets rid of girls by claiming to be gay, and who has his doubts about the club's management ("To me, shipping cash to Switzerland in canvas bags doesn't sound legal"). Other regulars include Josh (Matthew Keeslar), who casually mentions that he's an assistant district attorney, and Tom (Robert Sean Leonard), who has a theory that "the environmental movement was spawned by the re-release of `Bambi' in the late 1950s."

During the movie these people will date each other with various degrees of intensity. Charlotte's approach is to take no hostages; she invites the D.A. to dinner at a time when she doesn't even have an apartment, and then rents one. A real estate agent explains the concept of a "railroad flat" to her (you have to walk through both bedrooms and the kitchen to get to the bathroom, but the flat has two hall doors, so the best way to get from the front to the back is to walk down the hall).

If Scott Fitzgerald were to return to life, he would feel at home in a Whit Stillman movie. Stillman listens to how people talk, and knows what it reveals about them. His characters have been supplied by their Ivy League schools with the techniques but not the subjects of intelligent conversation, and so they discuss "The Lady and the Tramp" with the kind of self-congratulatory earnestness that French students would reserve for Marx and Freud. (Their analysis of the movie is at least as funny as the Quentin Tarantino character's famous deconstruction of "Top Gun" in the movie "Sleep With Me.")

Stillman has the patience to circle a punch line instead of leaping straight for it. He'll establish something in an early scene and then keep nibbling away until it delivers. The guy who dumps girls by claiming to be gay, for example, eventually explains that he always thought he was straight until, one day, he felt "something different" while watching Jim Fowler on "Wild Kingdom."

The movie has barely enough plot to hold it together; it involves drugs and money laundering, but it's typical of Stillman that most of the suspense involves the young D.A. fretting about a romantic conflict of interest. The underlying tone of the film is sweet, fond and a little sad: These characters believe the disco period was the most wonderful period of their lives, and we realize that it wasn't disco that was so special, but youth. They were young, they danced, they drank, they fell in love, they learned a few lessons, and the music of that time will always reawaken those emotions.

It's human nature to believe that if a club admits people like you, you will find the person you are looking for inside. The problem with that
theory is that wherever you go, there you are. At the end of "The Last Days of Disco," as the club scene fades, people are hired to stand
outside and pretend they have been turned away. When they get off work, what clubs do they go to? So it goes.
Roger Ebert
Chicago Sun-TImes

'The Last Days of Disco': Night Life of the Young: Urban and Genteel
Leave it to Whit Stillman, in completing the beguiling, literate trilogy that includes "Metropolitan" and "Barcelona," to begin a film about the New York nightclub scene of the early 1980s with a caste of distinction and a lofty show of utter confidence. At a disco entrance presided over by the usual elitist doorman, Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) makes only the teensiest concession to self-doubt. She and her college chum Alice (Chloe Sevigny) decide to arrive in a cab rather than on foot, but that hardly matters; stunning, assured Charlotte might as well float in on a cloud. "We look really good tonight," she tells the less secure Alice. "I'm sure we're going to get in." She ought to be. Stillman's smart, patrician characters have their worries, but social acceptability is seldom one of them.

In "The Last Days of Disco," he is again concerned with the youthful malaise of the privileged, and he once again renders his characters' fretfulness in deft, funny and improbably touching ways. Wild nights of the disco age are not dealt with here, because this is not a film about wild characters. It's about tame ones who poignantly, in the brief spell of liberation between the end of college and the start of serious careers, may be experiencing more fun and freedom than they ever will again.

If this film, which falls chronologically between the other two, doesn't fully rise to the lovely vibrancy of "Barcelona," it still extends the witty, quizzical style of Stillman's social comedies onto inviting new terrain. In the works long before disco revivals became the rage onscreen, "The Last Days of Disco" is sincerely nostalgic without campiness. It sees nightlife as an escape hatch for straight-arrow revelers who loved the club scene even if they didn't attract attention there, and who could be labeled as yuppies if they didn't quibble about the term.

Young and upscale, yes -- but as one of the film's many talkative, hair-splitting characters points out, none of them is enough of a success to qualify as a professional. "I think for a group to exist," says somebody, examining graffiti that reads "Kill Yuppie Scum," "someone has to admit to being part of it."

Humorously and fondly, with an entertaining supply of what he has called "prosaic license," Stillman again displays a pitch-perfect ear for both the cattiness and the camaraderie that bind his characters into collective friendship. (The film inveighs against the "ferocious pairing off" that is sure to tear the group apart.) Weaving together the disco backdrop (clearly recreated as a labor of love) with more sharp-edged material about college graduates finding their first footing in New York and learning to cook with Campbell's mushroom soup, he creates a bright panorama of shrewd young strivers.

These range from the showstopping Charlotte, played by the English Ms. Beckinsale with a persuasive American accent, to Chris Eigeman's fretful Des, who works at the club. Having starred in each of Stillman's films (and characters from the other two make cameo appearances here), Eigeman makes the filmmaker a perfect mouthpiece who can brood amusingly about anything, no matter how petty. Here he plumbs the psychological subtext of "Lady and the Tramp."

Ms. Sevigny, of "Kids," is seductively demure and a perfect foil for arrogant, meddlesome Charlotte. (Ms. Beckinsale was Jane Austen's Emma for British television and displays that same high-handedness here.) Among the men, who sound alike and share the same persnickety thought processes, Mackenzie Astin plays a dancing junior ad man who wins points at work for getting clients into the disco, while Robert Sean Leonard makes a dashing environmental lawyer. The film argues that his generation's concern for environmental causes can be traced to the revival of "Bambi" during its formative years.

Matt Keeslar, Matthew Ross and Tara Subkoff round out the group of friends, while David Thornton plays the club's owner with suitable shadiness. As someone says about his now-quaint business practices: "To me, shipping cash in canvas bags to Switzerland doesn't sound honest."
Janet Maslin
The New York Times

Boogie Nightly
Whit Stillman’s "The Last Days of Disco" is about the demise of the nightlife scene the way his 1994 film, "Barcelona," is about that stylish Spanish city. Which is to say, on the surface, this discursive drama concerns a certain genteel population of New York City in the early ’80s—well-bred, college-educated young women who work as low-paid corporate drones by day (subsidized by parents, marking time until society-approved marriage), and who, with their preppy beaux, transform themselves into high-rolling club kids by night. And it re-creates with tender rue the so-so old days of loud music, loose drugs, doormen standing sentinel behind velvet ropes, as well as the thrill of being a part of the trendy scene, however vacant and soul-deadening revisionist cultural history (and upcoming films like "Velvet Goldmine" and "54") reminds us the scene turned out to be.

But as with the politically ambitious "Barcelona" and his sharp first comedy of manners, 1992’s "Metropolitan," Stillman employs his story in the service of something deeper and much less trendy: a thoughtful study of decency and sin, loyalty and sex, friendship and socioeconomics, as manifested by articulate, attractive WASPs much like himself. But it’s no tedious sermon, not with Kate Beckinsale (of Much Ado About Nothing, doing a spotless American accent) and Chloe Sevigny (Kids) as Charlotte and Alice, a couple of publishing-house underlings who share a shabby post-graduate Manhattan apartment and a circle of disco-loving friends. Charlotte is an unhappy, competitive confidence wrecker, disguised as an “honest” friend; Alice is more innocent and direct, unformed but more attracted to a young man of style (Robert Sean Leonard) than to one of substance (MacKenzie Astin).

The fetching cast (including Jennifer Beals as a histrionic girlfriend), while a long way from Gwyneth and Matt stature, nevertheless reflects Stillman’s enhanced status as an established indie talent. But Stillmanites are likely to be even more pleased by the reappearance of some of his regulars, including Christopher Eigeman, who link this tender morality play to the filmmaker’s previous works (and, who, for good measure, make references to "Barcelona"). Stillman’s gang may be maturing precariously close to middle age, but it’s lovely to know the important pleasures of conversation and intellectual discussion endure. The bonding patterns of these specimen boomers only appear ordinary. In fact, they’re as entrancing as anything on the disco dance floor.
Lisa Schwarzbaum
Entertainment Weekly