By the late ’90s, writer-director Whit Stillman had carved out an unassailable niche in American independent film as the chuckling court chronicler of a forlorn and status-obsessed WASP culture. The film-maker's 1990 debut feature, Metropolitan, exhibited his uncommon talent for portraying the cerebral and romantic sparring of the privileged class with an effortless blend of amused affection and scathing, bone-dry humor. His other two works released that decade, Barcelona (1994) and The Last Days of Disco (1998) further solidified his reputation as an inimitable voice in American cinema, and together the three films comprise a loose trilogy of bourgeois romance and disillusionment.
Despite Metropolitan's mesmerizing screenplay, and Barcelona's bull’s-eye evocation of expat alienation, it's Disco that most strongly resonates as a skillful and perplexing film, now the that 21st century has had a chance to settle anxiously into place. Fortunately, the Criterion Collection released a new Blu-ray edition of The Last Days of Disco this week, offering contemporary cinephiles an opportunity to revisit Stillman's astonishing third film in a beautifully restored high-definition digital transfer.
The film follows a cluster of dissolute Manhattanites in the “Very Early Eighties” as they drift and groove through a work-and-play existence centered on a glitzy, ultra-fashionable Studio 54-like disco. To former classmates and current wary roommates Alice (Chloë Sevigny) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale), “getting in” is all that matters. The disco is not just a place to bump into Ivy League golden boys like Jimmy (Mackenzie Astin), Tom (Robert Sean Leonard), and Josh (Matt Keeslar), but a dazzling and permissive New World, where sensualism and calculated cool have supplanted the political radicalism of the Boomer cohort. Emceeing this group's strobe-lit nocturnal revelries is Des (Chris Eigeman), an anxious dissembler from the same silver-spoon circles who seems clownishly ill-suited in his role as one of the disco's managers.
The film's giddy but grounded aura of nostalgia—and suitably hit-drenched soundtrack—lends it a timeless quality, but it's the delicacy of tone that most impresses with Disco. Stillman balances his film on a mirror-ball pinnacle where warm portraiture and vicious satire not only co-exist, but complement one another splendidly. The filmmaker does not shrink in his portrayal of the characters' self-absorption and faux-intellectual posturing, but Stillman is never contemptuous of them. Indeed, he seems gently smitten with their veiled uncertainty and dopey naiveté. Tellingly, Disney cartoons appear as a recurring motif and topic of discussion, reflecting the arrested emotional development of the characters. Disco might be a deeply ambiguous film, but only because the director exhibits phenomenal control over the proceedings. Disgust threatens to bubble to the surface when one witnesses Charlotte's relentless back-handed swipes at Alice, or Des' thoroughly phony self-reflections, but Stillman's wry humor and his resolve to authentically render disco's joys ensure that the film floats gracefully above mean-spirited ugliness. This is the case even when the music stops, the velvet ropes vanish, and the Reagan Years truly begin.
Criterion's Blu-ray edition of The Last Days of Disco features a high-definition transfer of the restoration previously presented on their DVD edition, plus a new 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack. The Blu-ray also boasts a commentary track by Stillman, Sevigny, and Eigeman, deleted scenes, and other extras, with liner notes by author David Shickler.
