When it came time to ask my mother from where I sprung, the answer was mumbled, hesitant and ultimately horrifying: Disco. I chart my past in tentative steps; all that awful music, all those clothes. For a while there it seemed the whole world was built upon the notion that taste and rhythm must be left with the bulky doorman, that outmoded icon of clubbing. Yes ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it died a not-quick-enough death, but for a brief moment in the history of Western Civilisation Disco turned this healthy planet into a unrepentant world of sleaze. From this position I cannot view Whit Stillman's new film in a fair or dependable manner. Who knows, I may have been concieved in a glitzy yet oddly putrid cubicle and been the final toll of the bell that forced the ex go-go dancer and the goofball office clerk to become a tenuous whole. Such possiblities are falsely turned into memories by this new movie. I shall cast such subjective shackles off and try to be reasonable.
The film charts the night to night activities of some upwardly mobile yuppies in New York circa 1980, the titular last days of disco. By day they work in publishing firms or defend the lives of madmen, but when evening strikes they descend into the glittering universe of black-clad bouncers and vacuous conversation that takes place at exceedingly loud levels. Stillman, who in his previous films revealed a talent for social observation and witty dialogue, thins out the plot here and overdoses on sterile conversation. In the earlier Metropolitan and Barcelona, the intelligence and attractiveness of the characters was often balanced against the annoying and selfish tendencies many of them displayed. In this film many of the characters are plainly uninteresting, stripped of the wit found in their precedents. Whitman's dramatic technique forces this nagging lethargy upon us in turn, the film becoming all poor observation with a quite dull story of backdoor corruption thrown in to string the points along. Instead of finding a new form for his character driven films (as Woody Allen or Michael Winterbottom have) he gives us drugs and scandal which don't even connect to the larger theme, "The Last Days of Disco". The whole enterprise feels formulaic, and even the ironies and distancing devices which are employed to close the film fail because the jokes seem wasted and fairly arch. If he has tried to relay the stultifying atmosphere of the disco to the audience, he has succeeded admirably.
In his best film, Barcelona, Stillman gave us a sense of how two Americans would simultaneously attempt to adapt to a foreign country and remain dependable friends. It was a small, interior film which connected to a fine sense of time and place. Example: Fred (Chris Eigeman), so incensed by anti-American grafitti writes a reply on the next wall, all the time debating with his friend about the correct Spanish to use. It's the typical Stillman moment, acute self-awareness balanced by the constant performance of ritualistic habits. These characters are at once immersed in solipsism and sociability. Eigeman, who appears in Disco again, is the great character of all of these films, always ready to deconstruct serious topics while in a perpetual stream of doubt and questioning. His monologue about the empowering abilities of the female breast is the highlight of the film. The sensibility of such a character was once Stillman's too, one of love and hate for a social type he belonged to, the urban sophisticate. When moored in the dullness of the disco, Eigeman starts to complain while Stillman gets tired and ends up boring everyone. The opening scene of Boogie Nights captured all the short-lived glamour and regret of disco in ten glorious minutes. At two and one half hours, Last Days gets so laid-back it slides off the sofa into one long fade to black. It succeeds however, as a diversion into comfortable detachment, a study in filmmaking for the cinephile seeking contrast to the current palette.
ursula hackett
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