Written and Directed by Whit Stillman
1998’s The Last Days of Disco is the third and last film from once promising indie director Whit Stillman. His previous films, ‘Metropolitan’ and ‘Barcelona’, follow a formula of the political and sexual relationships of a few well to do characters (The three films are affectionately referred to as “the yuppie trilogy”) communicated mostly through conversation. You could tell that the director was trying to unify his filmography at this point, having cameos by characters from his previous films but it just made me wish this film could live up to the previous two. Unfortunately, ‘Disco’, while following the same formula, falls flat. It seems Stillman’s career stalled on a sour note.
The film is a stilted smorgasbord of characters living on the edge of the early 1980’s “Disco Sucks” movement who still believe in the glamour of nightclubs. Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale star as researchers for a publishing company hoping for upward mobility, but they spend most of their time at an exclusive downtown Discotheque. They kind of knew each other in college but not really and somehow end up working at the same job and becoming friends and roommates despite not liking each other. They’re joined by Chris Eigeman as the club’s junior manager, who is smarmy enough to tell women that he’s suddenly gay instead of breaking up with them. Eigeman, who is great at being a lovable bastard, joins Sevigny in trying to do the best they can with the given material. Beckinsale however never truly is able to handle the rhythm of the dialogue, which like David Mamet or (I hate to say it) Kevin Smith, has to be uniquely interpreted by certain actors.
The cast is rounded out with a Jimmy, a Josh, a Tom, a Van, and other mostly interchangeable males. Josh, played by Matt Keeslar, is a manic depressive assistant district attorney that we never actually see act crazier than reciting a hymn and who ties in the storyline of the disco being shut down by the feds due to money embezzling and drug dealing. The problem is, everything in the film plays so matter of factly. Our protagonists fall in and out of relationships without any real drama or emotional impact. There are conversations about money hidden in the basement, but we’re never really in on that aspect of the club. You can tell that Stillman is trying to show a different side of the disco scene than just polyester and John Travolta (and you know this because its part of the film’s concluding summation spoken by Josh) but it seems he just can’t decide whether he wants to have our characters at the epicenter of the end of disco or casually pass through it. At one point the film cuts away to historical footage of disco records being blown up in a baseball stadium and the riot of joy that ensues. But it all seems terribly shoe horned in when the rest of the time we just follow the general malaise of our disco goers, living in Studio 54 as interpreted for a TV sitcom.
Especially strange to me (and this is really no fault of the film or its’ makers) is that only two years later Chloe Sevigny and co-star Matt Ross would be appearing in a film that similarly addresses early-80’s yuppiedom in the adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho. But where ‘Psycho’ gives us a strong parable of the excess of the era, ‘Disco’ relegates any negativity to the background. Mostly we just watch our protagonists float through night after night talking, and occasionally dancing. The dancing is probably the best part of the film, set to an excellent era specific soundtrack, the film shows you life as it was- not everyone was a boogie king- people just wanted to have fun. Unfortunately, instead of grooving next to a dance partner briefly and then forgetting about them, the film insists on unifying everyone into a group. You never really believe these people would continue to interact, especially when you take into account how many of them supposedly attended college with one another.
** Two Stars – Watch it if you must
The Last Days of Disco is available now in a nice special edition DVD recently released by The Criterion Collection.
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