Metropolitan (1990)
A Bonus Post for Christmas.
We all have our own Christmas films. America’s keen on It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), a film which flopped at the box-office, but has grown in popularity over the years. In Britain, the same thing’s happening with Love Actually (2003), a gooey, awkward anthology; a Temple to Cringe rescued by a moving performance from Emma Thompson. For others, it’s a retreat to the nursery and time to dig out The Railway Children (1970), The Amazing Mr Blunden (1972) or Mary Poppins (1965). But I have two, year-in, year-out, Christmas favourites: Richard Williams’ Oscar-winning animation, A Christmas Carol (1972), which we covered in a previous post (read all about it in the archive) and Whit Stillman’s upper-class comedy of manners, Metropolitan (1990).
Oh how I adore this film! I’ve seen it countless times; I can recite the script (Whit Stillman won an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Original Screenplay’) off by heart. Set, ‘not so long ago’, at the fag-end of the New York deb scene, The Sally Fowler Rat Pack- a select group of precocious nineteen year olds in their first year at Ivy League universities- attend a series of balls and private ‘after-parties’ in their parents’ snazzy Upper East side apartments over Christmas. And Mein Gott, does the SFRP likes to talk. All this is very much my kind of film: cigarettes, cocktails; witty and amusing put-downs, a conversation piece set in gorgeous Park Avenue apartments where nothing happens- more Rattigan than Rambo, more Coward than Creature from the Black Lagoon.
As a child of the early 80s, I attended the London equivalent with my little sister; clearing out my wardrobe, recently, I found my double-breasted dinner jacket from these years, stained, torn and peppered with burns from Sobranie cigarettes. A relic of endless charity balls: Feathers, The Bluebird, The Blizzard, The Snow Ball, The Cinderella, The Roller Ball, The Titanic: a sea of teenage angst and taffeta; anxious mothers and affable fathers- talking career prospects in Carlyle Square drawing rooms before the main event; a polite contrast to the writhing snog-fest to follow.
Stillman shot Metropolitan on a shoestring, with an untried cast and crew, selling his flat for $50,000 to part-finance it, borrowing friends’ houses and Park Avenue lobbies to create the illusion of Upper East side apartments. And it looks elegant, shot on 16mm (blown up to 35mm), even if the murky lighting and muffled sound- the street scenes shot on natural light- add to its considerable charm. Like Woody Allen, Stillman’s imagined New York is the Manhattan we all know and love, even if, in reality, like a gaslit London, the truth, sometimes doesn’t quite bear out: The 21 Club, Scribner’s bookshop and A. T. Harris (all defunct), The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and The St. Regis hotel, carols at Saint Thomas’s. Whit Stillman based Metropolitan on his own personal experience- the deb circuit of the late 1960s- the period when the film is supposed to have been set, although lack of money (apart from the odd creaky black and white television set and a vintage Checker Cab) places the film, visually, at least, firmly in the late 1980s.
Whit nails it- and it’s like being nineteen all over again: the intrigue, the pretence, the jealousies, the insecurity, the intellectual postering, the jostling for position- when somebody can be your greatest friend for two weeks, and then never heard of again. And from a British perspective, American conversation- and manners- are, of course, more intense. Forget earnest discussions on the merits of Mansfield Park; friends this Side of the Pond were far more likely to pelt you with generous dollops of Charlotte Russe. But the sensibilities of the British Sloane Ranger and the American Prepster meet in so many ways: ‘what really matters’; to cry at carols, where five years at boarding school makes you sophisticated beyond your years, when the death of your dog hurts more than your grandfather’s demise.
Stillman’s two subsequent films Barcelona (1994)- a Jamesian take on Americans in Europe- and The Last Days of Disco (1998)- best described as ‘Northanger Abbey hits Studio 54’- form a loose trilogy, alongside Metropolitan. And we will be having a closer look at The Last Days of Disco in a future post. Metropolitan’s anti-hero, Nick Smith, played in three terrific performances by Chris Eigeman (renamed in the last two films, but essentially the same character) steals the show with his pithy, throwaway quips. And, for now, I will leave you with one of the best:
“Rick von Slonecker is tall, rich, good looking, stupid, dishonest, conceited, a bully, liar, drunk, and thief, an egomaniac and probably psychotic. In short, highly attractive to women.”
Metropolitan (1990) is available to watch via DVD and Blu-ray, although, currently, there appears to be no digital download in the UK. I suspect this may differ in America. The Criterion Collection’s ‘Director Approved Special Edition’ DVD is the one to get, featuring the Pierre Le-Tan cartoon on the cover (just like The New Yorker), a high-definition digital transfer and audio commentary from director Whit Stillman and Metropolitan stars, Chris Eigeman and Taylor Nichols.
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