When writer-director Whit Stillman made his film debut in 1990 with Metropolitan, he stood out from other filmmakers of his generation by creating a witty comedy-drama that felt like a drawing room farce from another era, one that might have been co-written by Oscar Wilde and Jane Austin. A Harvard graduate who worked in both journalism and publishing ventures in New York City, Stillman has built a successful career as an indie filmmaker who specializes in highly educated, well-heeled character portraits drawn from his own experiences. These protagonists, usually young, upwardly mobile yuppies from wealthy families and graduates from some Ivy League college, has led some critics to label him the WASP alternative to Woody Allen’s brand of urban tales. This sort of specialized focus might seem too self-absorbed and unhip compared to the work of filmmaking peers like Spike Lee and Steven Soderbergh, but look closer and you’ll see that Stillman is crafting a kind of late 20th century chamber play which addresses social mores, class differences, economic disparity and city life as it relates to a very specific demographic. And in his third feature film, The Last Days of Disco (1998), it proves to be a sexy, romantic, poignant and often hilarious group portrait with a distinctive literary quality (Whitman would subsequently turn the screenplay into the novel, The Last Days of Disco, With Cocktails at Petrossian, which was published in 2000).
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Cinema Sojourns 