The Last Days of Disco

Whit Stillman was contracted to turn this movie into a novel (published in 2000 as The Last Days of Disco, With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards; Christ, what a pompous title) — and it should always have been a novel, not a movie. What passes for a story here gains nothing from having been filmed. The era is the early ’80s, but it’s really the same airless, elite whenever that Stillman’s other two movies (Metropolitan and Barcelona) inhabit. Stillman has no feel for the lurid milieu of disco clubs, no particular affinity for the music; he picks overused songs and employs them as bland background Muzak. I can marginally recommend it for Kate Beckinsale (looking like Neve Campbell’s icy older sister) and the always engaging Chloe Sevigny, but the male characters are of no interest whatsoever, and the self-absorbed chat goes on and on without variations or even much personality. Proof that not every talky art-house film does it for me.

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