The Last Days of Disco Review

by James Sanford (jasanfor AT MCI2000 DOT com)
June 7th, 1998

THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO
Directed by Whit Stillman
A younger friend recently told me how jealous he was of the people who were in college in the early 1980s: "All those great clubs, all that great music," he gushed. Yeah, I thought, and spiraling inflation, student-loan cutbacks and the promise of an unfriendly job market when you got out of school. Happy times, those.
"The Last Days of Disco," set, according to its opening title in "the very early 1980s," brings back the P.M. (Pre-Madonna) era in disturbing detail, recalling the romantic glitziness of the disco years as well as the sleazy drugginess that ultimately defined and destroyed the party. But rather than focusing on disco's demise, writer-director Whit Stillman merely uses it as a backdrop for a group portrait of a handful of young New Yorkers fresh out of college and anxious for adventure and love. Because this is Stillman ("Barcelona," "Metropolitan") they spend much of their time discussing what they want to do rather than actually doing it, but their intelligent, often hilarious conversation turns out to be such a refreshing change from the usual summer movie dialogue (which generally runs the gamut from "What do you want from me?" to "Run!") you'll probably be content to let them ramble on and on.
The centerpieces of the ensemble are Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) and Alice (Chloe Sevigny, looking like a young and streetwise Meryl Streep), former classmates who now work together as underpaid underlings in a publishing house and spend their nights in The Club, a Studio 54-style disco. Charlotte is the more forthright, brassy one, always offering such unsolicited advice as "whenever you can, try to throw the word 'sexy' into your conversations." The slightly more demure Alice not only tolerates her slightly overbearing friend but seems to enjoy her company, at least that is until Charlotte blurts out in front of Alice's date about the bottle of tetracycline on Alice's dresser, then tries to smooth things over by telling Alice that sometimes veneral disease "is not all bad, there are actually positive aspects."
Circling Charlotte and Alice are Dez (Christopher Eigemann), an assistant Club manager who fears both responsibility and his own sexual urges; Jimmy (Mackenzie Astin), an ad agency lackey whose idea of success is being able to afford to send his shirts out to the laundry; and Josh (Matt Keeslar), a genuinely nice guy who's also an assistant district attorney and a manic depressive. Alice falls fo Josh anyway, prompting Charlotte to snipe, "From the start, you know he's defective: You usually don't find that out until much later."
The performances by the entire ensemble are delightful, with Beckinsale and Keeslar particularly impressive. Of course, it helps that they get most of the sharpest lines. Josh's lengthy analysis of Disney's "Lady and the Tramp" as the type of movie that "programs women to adore jerks" is genuinely brilliant.
Stillman also provides a hard-to-resist soundtrack pulsating with such seductive oldies as Evelyn "Champagne" King's "I Don't Know If It's Right" and Diana Ross' sizzling "I'm Coming Out" : Do you think she had any idea what she was singing about back in 1980?. A-

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