The Last Days of Disco (Whit Stillman, 1998).
Barely a few minutes into Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco (1998), a young Manhattanite refers to the city’s bustling nightclub scene as a full-blown movement—partying is not a lifestyle nor a hobby, but a kind of mission. His name is Josh (Matt Keeslar), a recent graduate who still cringes at the “social wasteland” of his college years, and evidently thought clubs would fix that overnight. “What I found so encouraging,” he tells a pal, “was the idea that when the time came to have a social life, there’d be all these places where people could go to.” Except the right places are impossible to get into. Ironically, the disco enthusiast has never actually stepped foot inside a disco, and as he sneaks his way into one of New York’s most iconic, he marvels at the neon-lit world as if it were a buzzy parlor in eighteenth-century Paris. “Cocktails, dancing, conversations, exchange of ideas and points of view,” he sings to the jaded club manager. “It’s what I always dreamed of!”
Though The Last Days of Disco teems with too many characters to be wholly and exclusively his story, Josh is the one who most eloquently spells out the sort of longing that fuels this and all of Stillman’s luminous films. Chamber pieces and class ethnographies often set in an unidentified “not so long ago” past—eras that, with the notable exception of his one unequivocal period film, the 2016 Jane Austen adaptation Love & Friendship, seem to have literally just ended—Stillman’s works all radiate an anachronistic quality, as do their outrageously articulate protagonists. Erudite preppies living in privileged bubbles and hopelessly out of touch with the world around them, Stillman’s heroes straddle past and future. They’re all invariably young, and the films find them at pivotal farewell junctures, as they leave the glitzy turfs of early adulthood to wade, alone, into the next chapter. So it is for the twentysomething descendants of New York aristocracy that make up the Urban Haute Bourgeoisie of Stillman’s 1990 debut, Metropolitan, or the recently graduated yuppies of 1998’s Disco, or the girl posses and frats of his 2011 campus comedy Damsels in Distress.
The Stillman hero is a deeply melancholic creature, painfully aware that the milieus they love, sooner or later, will vanish forever. But such nostalgia requires careful phrasing. It is not an era that Stillman’s films and their youngsters long for, strictly speaking, so much as the spaces for communion those earlier times made possible. At the heart of Stillman’s cinema is a gaping loneliness. His tales are about people who must either cling to their old cliques or fashion new ones to find solace and purpose. It’s a restlessness that cuts through social hierarchies; it makes Stillman’s characters eminently relatable, and the films often heartrending.
The director’s own memories of life in 1970s New York sponge something of Josh’s ennui in Disco. Now 71, Stillman has spent the past twenty-five years living in Paris; when we spoke, a few days before he’d head to the south of France for a wondrous retrospective of his oeuvre held at FIDMarseille, he described his post-graduation years in New York as a time of profound alienation, a feeling that made for a stark contrast with the novels he’d been devouring. “When reading War and Peace, or Fitzgerald’s novels, or Balzac’s, you’d always sense that the society those books describe had a palpable texture. Whereas the atomization I experienced in America in those years was just terrible. So I became obsessed with this idea of creating, through film, a kind of social fabric.”
Nothing in Stillman’s cinema is more sacred or more pressing than that urge. For the blue-blooded freshmen of Metropolitan, their parents’ (but always somehow parents-free) Park Avenue living rooms serve as holy temples where they can meet, flirt, kvetch, and grow. Disco ends with club manager Des (Stillman regular Chris Eigeman) comparing the closures of New York’s nightspots in the early 1980s to death itself, and the analogy becomes even more pointed in Damsels in Distress, which orbits around a suicide prevention center helmed by a college student, Greta Gerwig’s Violet, determined to heal the clinically depressed with a mix of good hygiene, good manners, and plenty of tap-dancing. Even the director’s foreign projects—Barcelona (1994), the second chapter in a trilogy about “doomed bourgeois in love” sandwiched between Metropolitan and Disco, and the pilot of the Paris-set The Cosmopolitans (2014), the only surviving episode of an aborted Amazon TV series—hail collectivity as the ultimate safety net, dogging American expats as they seek refuge in cafés, bars, and chats. If loneliness is the narrative catalyst behind Stillman’s films, is it any wonder that his characters should all fret, to borrow from Disco again, about “the tremendous importance of group social life”?
Metropolitan (Whit Stillman, 1990).
“I don’t think there’s anything pessimistic about these films, though,” Stillman was keen to clarify. “I consider myself firmly in the comedy camp; mine are all smiley face comedies. But people in Europe always seemed to react differently to US audiences. The same films that Americans would consider silly and lighthearted here have often been taken as serious, melancholic dramas. Metropolitan’s Cannes premiere, for instance, was a surprisingly quiet screening.”
Stillman’s debut reached southern France after earlier Stateside stops at Sundance and New Directors/New Films. Made with a shoestring budget (a reported $230,000), it earned the director an Oscar nomination for best original script, and exemplifies the anthropological flair of his later projects, his insider-level knowledge of those different tribes and their patois, his ability to make such insular worlds feel so open and vulnerable. Stillman’s drifters are all animated by an almost sacred survival instinct to belong, and there’s something compelling about the way in which Metropolitan and its successors can square that need with the somewhat tragic notion that the places their heroes look for solace are all hermetic bubbles on the brink of extinction.
That lingering out-of-business feel may well explain why Stillman’s often pegged as an “old-fashioned” filmmaker, a label that’s as grating as it is vacuous. For while the gilded milieus the director enjoys surveying may all be technically extinct, there’s nothing stale about his cinema. Stillman does not revisit the past with a nostalgist’s tidiness, but with the empathetic eye of someone who refuses to mock his subjects, and allows them to articulate their anxieties and tempestuous emotions instead. No artist has exerted a more long-lasting influence on the cineaste than Jane Austen; long before he dug up the writer’s seldom-read epistolary novella Lady Susan, on which Love & Friendship is based, Stillman’s characters wielded irony as a subversive weapon. That’s perhaps the one sense in which his films really are unapologetically retro; they view style (the combination of one’s manners, diction, charms, and wit) as both a means to cope with society’s restrictions and to pursue forbidden pleasures without fear of retribution. For all their outward allegiance to traditions and etiquette, Stillman’s protagonists are disruptors. His films are dotted with people struggling to extricate mores from morality, people who aren’t afraid of breaking the rules (so long as this doesn’t threaten our basic humanity and decency), and have a decidedly grand time in the process.
That sense of subversion reverberates all through Stillman’s fourth feature, Damsels in Distress. Released thirteen years after Disco (“I didn’t take a break,” the director once remarked at a reunion with his Metropolitan cast, “the industry took a break on me”), Damsels doubles as a kind of campus farce. The observational acuity of Stillman’s first triptych remains intact: this one too is intimately attuned to its characters’ quirks and jargons. But the students of the fictional Ivy League-type Seven Oaks College move in a sort of dream world, a feeling amplified by Doug Emmett’s cinematography, which bathes faces in white and pink halos, as if everyone and everything belonged to a fantasy. These aren’t flesh-and-bones characters so much as archetypes, but to dismiss the film for its seemingly jejune prim-girls-versus-frat-boys antics is to fail to appreciate how it covers both broad and high comedy with equal verve. The screwball energy Damsels emits, down to the dance craze fantasia it ends with, marks a strident break from the naturalism that governed Stillman’s first three projects. And yet the zaniness doesn’t necessarily contradict the perspicacity of his insights. There’s a deep-seated archness to the director's brainy dialogues; in Damsels, that surrealism explodes to rollicking effects, caroming off scenes that are among the funniest and most joyful Stillman’s ever shot.
Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman, 2011).
“I still think [Damsels] is my most courageous film, but it was hard,” he remembered. “A lot of our supporters just wouldn’t join us for the journey—out of snobbery, I suppose. Broad comedy tends to trigger certain people.”
When I asked him what propelled the break from the more true-to-life approach of his earliest projects, Stillman quoted, of all things, the 2003 Will Ferrell comedy Elf, which he saw early into his Parisian retreat. “I’d long been a Steve Martin fan, and became a Ferrell one, too. I just adored Elf—that kind of silly, innocent, well-meaning comedy. And I started to be drawn to that cinema.”
That Stillman should invoke Ferrell as inspiration is nothing surprising, since pop and screwball references long predate Damsels. One of Disco’s most indelible conversations features the cast dissecting The Lady and the Tramp as a dangerous manifesto for dating-age girls; early into Barcelona, Taylor Nichols’s Chicago transplant breaks into a jitterbug to “Pennsylvania 6-5000,” all while holding a Bible. Critical debates around Stillman tend to focus on his astonishingly overeducated dialogue, an emphasis that often threatens to paint his satires as documents of privilege best appreciated by the very class he’s lampooning. But the director’s not immune to the mainstream or the flat-out silly. His films match pop with pomp. They weave their hijinks into his traditionally wry commentary, and the calibrated mix is, I suspect, part of the reason why they still feel so joltingly alive.
In a sense, Stillman’s projects are all time capsules, but they are period pieces without clear period markers. In the undefined, pre-Woodstock past of Metropolitan, vintage Checker Cabs shuffle next to contemporary cars; in Damsels in Distress, ostensibly set in the present, no smartphones or tech gadgets ever bob up. Stillman makes no pretense of concealing the anachronisms, which cultivates this feeling of being at once trapped in a defunct epoch and locked in a time loop, where past and present exist in the same continuum.
“Our budget limitations became an opportunity for us to create a living period,” he says of Metropolitan. “I’d much rather have the occasional out-of-period element in the background than have a very fake, very artificial set with lots of extras in costume walking around.”
I suggested that’s the reason why his films never feel museological, why the past he dredges up never looks inert or amber-colored; more living tissue than faded postcard. Stillman nodded, even as he sometimes worries that this may be why people might find his work challenging.
“I’m a utopian, but my utopias have elements from the past,” he pondered. “We know that there are things that worked wonderfully in previous eras, and my films try to incorporate them. It’s a renaissance view. And people might be hostile to that.”
Perhaps. Yet I wonder if that utopian amalgam can also account for his films’ longevity. “These are all works that were all born out of date,” Stillman observed once we turned to their legacy, “and maybe that’s what helped them endure. That, and the fact that they were never overexposed, which leaves space for a discovery process, for word of mouth.”
To venture into a Stillman film is to wake up to the many oppositions on which his art stands and thrives. “The problem with the genre today,” he told me as we returned to comedy, “is that films have become excessively opportunistic—they’re all and only about being silly and nailing the jokes. And directors are no longer interested in what you’d call naturalistic approaches.” Maybe Stillman’s own naturalism depends on being faithful to all of his films’ heightened qualities, even as their blending can sometimes make for jarring clashes. But for all their stridency, these apparent contradictions—between Stillman’s unapologetically literary scripts and the deft acting of his casts, between broad and high comedy, between period and present-day elements—are the reason his work has lost none of its freshness and electricity.
Unashamedly smart but never smug, melancholic but not reactionary, Stillman’s films seesaw between solitude and unbridled lust for life. The longing I’m left grappling with whenever I revisit them isn’t all that different from what his characters succumb to, eventually. The heartbreaking thrill of hanging out with longtime friends for one memorable, last time—before the group will break up, pals will pair off, hangouts will shut, and everything and everyone will fall indelibly into the not so long ago past.