“I consider you a person of some integrity—except, you know, in your relations with women.” That must be the most important line spoken in any Stillman film pinpointing the many ways his movies marry sociological study, comedy of manners and a rather clear moral position. If The Last Days of Disco is Stillman’s masterpiece is because it’s the one that most clear articulates the ways one witness unaware our slow decay towards barbarism, the idea that ultimate links all his four historical films. One stumbles upward, while the world around it just awkwardly disappears. It is as beautiful elegiac as it is witty because Stillman sincere belief that “the yuppie scum” deserves its elegy too. There’s plenty of behavior beauties…

"It's not just that we don't know each other well; I'm not even sure we really like each other."

Now I'd like to think that anti-disco sentiment is essentially a thing of the past in American society, and for all I know such is the case—as my monocultural radar no longer extends beyond Trump(ism) outrage, the NBA and the Premier League (to the extent that Association football has any foothold in America's collective brainwaves). But many moons ago when I was a schoolboy in the 1990s, certain halfwits with whom I matriculated would sometimes don "Disco Sucks" gear as though the matter hadn't already been settled in their dads' favor before we were born. Anyhow disco rules, and we all…

Whit Stillman’s independent ode to disco, relationships and shallow self-exploration through the then-bourgeoning yuppie lens, The Last Days of Disco, follows the stilted, brainy beauty Alice (Chloë Sevigny) and her viciously pushy coworker-cum-roommate Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) as they navigate the nuances of gaining exclusive club entrance, dating a sliding scale of schmucks, affording rent as a glorified intern, and the finer points of living with shitty roommates. 

As with Metropolitan, The Last Days of Disco was shot on-location in New York, and there are a potpourri of bygone NYC establishments, recognizable landmarks and guilefully repurposed spaces. The interiors of the not-exactly-Studio-54-discotheque, which is never once named-dropped within the story and whose entrance is depicted on Vandam St just off Hudson…

"'Disco will never be over. It will always live in our minds and hearts. Something like this, that was this big, and this important, and this great, will never die. Oh, for a few years - maybe many years - it'll be considered passé and ridiculous. It will be misrepresented and caricatured and sneered at, or - worse - completely ignored. People will laugh about John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, white polyester suits and platform shoes and people going like *this* but we had nothing to do with those things and still loved disco . Those who didn't understand will never understand: disco was much more, and much better, than all that. Disco was too great, and too much fun, to…