SEE Magazine
Copyright © 1998. All Rights Reserved.
ON SCREEN
BY CYNTHIA AMSDENPREVIEW
The Last Days of Disco (Polygram)
Written, directed by Whit Stillman
Starring Chloe Sevigny, Kate Beckinsale and Matt KeeslarThe early '80s were often referred to as the salad days before the safety-pin-and-puke days of punk, which preceded the skin-and-bones days of the 1989 recession. And it's true, those were endive days and balsamic vinaigrette nights.
They were also high-powered yuppie times, full of nauseously conspicuous consumption. To live through it was to feel like you were momentarily important; to reminisce about it is to realize the resounding shallowness of the era. Taste was secondary to the demonstration of wealth. And if cash wasn't available, flamboyance was always an acceptable fall-back.
The Last Days of Disco is the third in a trilogy of films by director Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, Barcelona), grandson of Digby Balzell, the historian who coined the élitist term WASP. Set in the late '70s/early '80s, the story follows two recent Hampshire College graduates, Alice (Chloe Sevigny - Kids, Palmetto) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale - Shooting Fish, Cold Comfort Farm), through their days as assistants at a publishing house in New York and nights at the most popular dance club during the last days of disco. There they meet with a group of slightly older, more accomplished Harvard grads. They work; they dance; they pair off viciously. Then they try to find meaning in it all.
Thankfully, Last Days isn't a straight Hollywood narrative of the era. If it were, the unalloyed geekiness of disco would turn the film into an Adam Sandler extravaganza. Stillman wisely went the other route; he made it an art-house film disguised as a mall movie, making Last Days a dance-club version, much like Kevin Smith's Clerks (a comedy about the profundities of working in a convenience store).
In a telephone interview from Toronto, Stillman explained this film "doesn't need Marshall McLuhan to explain it. This isn't a European festival film where there's a key and you have to unlock something symbolic or complex."
Essentially, this film is about life on the fun side of the velvet rope. But the director is adamant about what the audience takes away. "I really don't want this to be about disco. It's about the characters; I want the audience to feel emotion for the characters.
"It is easier for us to connect with (the characters) because of the laughs, but people have to do a bit of work to get the emotion that's behind the laughs. Yes, you can have a satirical take on the characters, but it would be a pity if you just loathed them."
The characters in the film are laughable, almost loathable. In one priceless scene, two guys battle it out, figuratively speaking, over Alice by debating the relative interpretations of the animated film, The Lady and the Tramp. If the term "pompous triviality" ever needed definition, this scene should do the trick.
Then there's Alice herself, the quintessential pursed-lipped woman of the era; the archetypical disco dish who poses while dancing. While Sevigny brought a quality of cool to the role, she managed it by maintaining one single expression throughout the entire film. And it's perfect.
The essence of disco and the concept of cool, over the ensuing years, has not changed, according to Stillman.
"It seems, throughout my whole life, there has always been a certain cool that has always been cool and still is. There are varieties of cool but, for me, there's a cool kind of person. They withhold their emotions more than other people."
| Go To Issue Contents | Go To Main Index | Go To Listings |