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LAST DAYS OF DISCO PROFESSIONALThey’re assistants at a publishing house, vying to climb the same professional ladders alongside Dan ( Matt Ross), an Ivy League prep who thinks he hates disco when in fact he is as afraid as everyone else of not getting in. Alice and Charlotte move into a cramped railroad apartment with a friend named Holly ( Tara Subkoff), who’s as nondescript, personality-wise, as this two-woman showdown would seem to demand. LAST DAYS OF DISCO FULLAnd it makes a full two decades since Flashdance’s Jennifer Beals first shrieked, in the midst of being dumped by Chris Eigeman’s two-timing Des-whose break-up line is to claim he’s gay-“You only found out you were gay on Wednesday?” LAST DAYS OF DISCO MANUALIt means 20 years since the peerless Kate Beckinsale invented “negging”-I am convinced there is nothing you can find in a greasy pick-up artists’ manual on talking to women that Beckinsale’s character, Charlotte, didn’t already inflict on her closest frenemy. Twenty years of Disco means 20 years of Chloë Sevigny saying she thinks Scrooge McDuck is sexy-to reference just one unimpeachably quotable mishap. LAST DAYS OF DISCO MOVIEThis is a curious movie to commemorate, for that reason. But in Stillman’s hands, it inspires affection. That should inspire something like annoyance, if not outright dismissal, from people who know better. It's all too educated, too white, too full of want for anyone's good. ![]() Stillman has a way of making his movies feel like they belong to the same class as the cloistered strata of young people he's been making movies about for his entire career. Its sharp but loving cynicism is timeless and indulgent, too. ![]() The movie has survived, I think, on the insight of that choice-ably carried out by costume designer Sarah Edwards, whose designs made Sevigny and Beckinsale’s characters into fashion icons-and on the strength of its attitude. Courtesy of Gramercy Pictures/Everett Collection. And this is a movie that revels in the glories of those errors.Ĭhloë Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale. These are characters who seem to relish their mistakes, or at the very least to refuse to stop making them. The movie's pinwheeling plot-criss-crossing romantic affairs, a drug and money-laundering scandal, employment woes, etc., etc.-is an overwhelming morass of wit, language, deviance, insecurity, and perhaps above all, pleasure. I'm not even sure that love, which can apparently thrive in even the crime and unemployment-ridden New York City of the 1980s, is what you’d call the endgame here. But Stillman’s stylish, effervescent chronicle of recently graduated, handsomely cruel yuppies in love-his third, after 1990’s Metropolitan and 1994’s Barcelona-doesn’t take a hard, singularly critical line on those foibles. But they dance their way to the movie’s finish line nonetheless, their aspirations undulled. Half of them no longer have any means of paying their rent. The waning disco era has officially been declared dead, they’ve just learned, and the club they all love has been shut down by scandal. Later, as the movie’s winding to a close, this same group of friends huddles in front of the city unemployment office, their romantic and professional lives having, by this point, shifted twice or even thrice over. College friends and co-workers Alice and Charlotte-a career-best Chloë Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale, respectively-go so far as to hire a cab from a block away for the sake of appearing decadent. Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco, released 20 years ago today, opens-where else?-in front of the hottest disco in town, where over the course of 24 minutes we’ll come to meet almost everyone this movie wants us to get to know: an underpaid pair of book-publishing lackeys, an ad agent, an assistant district attorney, and all of their overeducated compatriots. ![]()
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