Disco Inferno
THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO
Every character is adulterated and insincere--just like the
world of corporate careers and jaunty clubs they inhabit.
With Kate Beckinsale, Chris Eigeman, Mackenzie Astin
Written & directed by Whit Stillman
THE CHARACTERS IN Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco all make very bad first impressions, and most of them don't get any better as they go along. It's hard to tell whether Stillman believes that Charlotte, Des, Jimmy and their friends are shallow, self-centered, twentysomething jerks, or whether he believes they're just at an age where it seems that way.
No matter. In his characteristically wooden, but this time wonderfully funny and incisive new movie, Stillman takes us back to "the very early '80s" and spins a tale of half a dozen characters whose social lives revolve around a Studio 54-type club, which represents all the desperate ambition and befuddled identity of that odd and hoary passage of American cultural history.
In Metropolitan and Barcelona--his earlier, overpraised movies--Stillman's dry, sluggish, overly mannered dissection of uptown WASPs seemed too clumsy and academic. In The Last Days of Disco, he's still no better at directing his actors, many of whom say their lines so flatly that they often seem incompetent, and so hurriedly that the movie would be 20 minutes longer if they spoke at a normal rate of speed. But this time Stillman finds a point of view that's "sophisticated" in the most literal sense of the word: Until things begin to change slightly toward the end, every character in The Last Days of Disco is adulterated and insincere, just like the world of corporate careers and jaunty clubs they inhabit.
In fact, the disco daze is just a ruse for Stillman to explore the way some privileged young people--dorky, hapless guys and edgy, competitive women--conduct friendship and sex. The scenes inside the disco have an other-worldly feel because Stillman turns down the music so you can hear his characters converse without distraction. It's disquieting and unnatural, but so is their churlish sophistry. Several times one character says "it's important to be in control of our own destiny." So naturally Stillman makes them all thoroughly lacking in self-awareness, and except for a few cases he keeps them that way.
The plot revolves around two sets of college friends and involves a bit of romantic swapping, not so much for sex and adventure, but rather to find a compliant mate--which is pretty hard to do if you have no idea who you are, what you want, or what you believe (the characters often make arguments simply because they have the intellectual capacity to do so).
The men--three of them, all Harvard grads--are Des (Chris Eigeman), who works as a manager at the disco, and who's such a neurotic snake that he tells women he's gay to break up with them (two in one night); Jimmy (Mackenzie Astin), a junior advertising exec who brings clients to the club to impress them; and Josh (Matt Keeslar), a prosecutor investigating the club's owner for crimes ranging from tax evasion to drug sales (echoes of the real Studio 54). The women--two of them, both now working for a book-publishing firm--are Alice (Chloe Sevigny), who's insecure about men and who desperately wants to be wild and carefree; and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale), who blurts out whatever pops into her head, even if it embarrasses or devastates Alice.
A few others get drawn into the mix, most notably Dan, who works at the publishing firm and wants to organize manuscript readers (like Alice and Charlotte) and clerical workers (like him) into a union; and Tom (Robert Sean Leonard), who's secretly sleeping with his longtime girlfriend even though they're on a trial separation, and who also sleeps once with Alice, who (it turns out) is a virgin--and who gets herpes from him. (Another blast from the past: You don't hear much about herpes any more in the age of AIDS.)
What keeps The Last Days of Disco from becoming a soap opera is Stillman's droll, stylized dialogue, which is occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. When Des comes out to a woman he wants to dump, he says he realized he was gay one Wednesday morning while watching "that attractive younger guy" who stars with Marlin Perkins on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. When Alice salvages the publication of a fraudulent non-fiction book by reclassifying it as self-help, Dan muses: "Mumbo-jumbo of all kinds has been very popular throughout the history of publishing. The first printed book was the Bible."
Okay, so those are one-liners. But they're unusually smart ones, and every joke in Stillman's movie takes a pungent satirical jab at some aspect of the convoluted culture he's exploring. You almost don't care that so many of his actors could use diction lessons. Sevigny (from Kids) and Eigeman (who appears in every Stillman movie) are the biggest offenders, although Beckinsale, who does a fine American accent (she's English), frequently offends as well. Astin gets by on his fresh-faced charm, and Leonard, the most familiar member of the cast, has always talked too quickly. It's as if Stillman doesn't care whether his actors can act, just as long as they utter all of his piquant words, although Sevigny slurs a few sentences beyond recognition.
Only Keeslar, whose doleful character Josh is the most interesting, seems to have rehearsed his lines: He plays a sweet young man who had a mental breakdown in college (he's now sedated by lithium) and who truly wants to do the right thing in a world of insincere friends and insecure women. So it may be Stillman's subtlest joke that manic-depressive Josh falls for high-strung Alice, the virgin with herpes.