Although judging from the men they mean to wrangle onto the dance floor or into bed, their pulchritude turns out to be more of a disadvantage: The nebbish adman Jimmy Steinway (Mackenzie Astin), forever attempting to sneak his crusty, quinquagenarian clients into the club, and the wishy-washy, broad-eye browed Tom (Robert Sean Leonard) are justifiably terrified of attractive women.Īs a much younger man I saw trailers for the original theatrical run of Last Days and envisioned a somber relationship drama, probably due to a mix of jejune misunderstanding and egregious mis-marketing. And rather than admiring disco on its own terms, the two view the dance scene-particularly the buoyant, popular club managed by the womanizing cad Des (Chris Eigeman, in the most entertaining manifestation of his typecast smart-aleck)-primarily as a way of exercising what sexual power they have upon the cold, impartial dating environment. The pale, porcelain Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale), a hot-shit rich girl who misses being the center of the male student body’s attention, vents her aggression by belittling and exposing the vulnerabilities of her fleshier, more modest flat-mate and co-worker Alice (Chloë Sevigny, before Vincent Gallo’s erupting phallus would disable her ability to play innocent believably). As Kate Beckinsale’s acidic female back-handedly confides to her “friend”: “Maybe in physical terms I’m a little cuter than you, but you should be much more popular than I am.”Īlso unlike the wounded masculinity on display in Metropolitan and Barcelona, the focus of Last Days is a psychologically authentic and painfully parasitic female relationship. This sets the stage for a Darwinian game of survival of the wittiest, and Stillman divides the weak from the strong with sharp, snarky bon mots that, unlike the puerile put-downs of his previous two movies, smart like hell and destroy tenuous reputations while somehow keeping the audience chuckling. Despite the elegiac title, the film is more concerned with unceremonious cherry-popping premieres (both literal and figurative): The plot rhythmically orbits around a collection of former Ivy Leaguer pals who are desperately attempting to claw their way up the lower rungs of prestige vocations (law, advertising, publishing) while discovering that the self-sufficiency of university life has filed their nails down to blunt, inutile nubs. A far cry from the complacent curtain call to Barcelona, Last Days is easily the most hard-knock of the Stillman triad, depicting the fate of social ineptitude and romantic uncertainty doomed to befall post-Harvard preppies after they first venture out of the mother’s bosom of Sever Hall. The Last Days of Disco imagines post-grads not unlike those of Metropolitan in their uncomfortable late 20s, stumbling over their parents’ ideals on the way to connubial compromises and modest career advances. This may be why Stillman, possibly taking a cue from wildly successful contemporary Quentin Tarantino, sought his story’s finale in the chronological center. Could those yuppies really have metamorphosed into mature adults that easily? Even the denouement to Stillman’s bubbly debutante-laden debut Metropolitan was more appropriately bittersweet the sub-adults had won the puppy love battle for that day, but the war’s outcome was anything but certain. It’s an odd moment in Stillman’s cinema: Not precisely gratuitous, given the events of that middle film, but there’s a sense of unrewardingly pat self-actualization that seems altogether too kind to the characters’ sheltered milieu. At the close of Barcelona, the second entry in Whit Stillman’s loose Urban Haute-Bourgeoisie trilogy, the lifelong friends played by Chris Eigeman and Taylor Nichols are basking in an idyllic Grand Lake summer with their Andalusian spouses chit-chatting beside them.
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