The Last Days of Disco

“Disco will never be over.  It will always live in our hearts and minds.”

Directed by Whit Stillman (1998) Starring: Chloe Sevigny, Kate Beckinsale, Chris Eigeman, Matt Keeslar

Rounding off Stillman’s Yuppie Trio is a film about the end of an era from the point of view of two assistants at a publishing company.  Charlotte (Beckinsale) and Alice (Sevigny) spend their time at their favorite club, where they dance and judge what relationships they would get out of the men they meet.  Their dialogue is often caustic and witty and they only ever seem to imagine hope when they talk about beloved disco.

Of their prospective suitors, Alice has the highest optimism and the worst luck.  She loses her virginity to Tom (Robert Sean Leonard) and gains two venereal diseases.  After that she bounces between Des (Eigeman) who is something of a cocaine addict and womanizer and Josh (Keeslar) who is very nice, but has a history of mental illness.  Her optimism also gets crushed a little as she lives with Charlotte in a Railroad apartment.

The third act moves from the female perspective to the men’s side, which makes it feel like Alice and Charlotte are left hanging for awhile.  Des’s club is involved in illegal activity of some sort, although he points out that he knows next to nothing about it.  Josh’s office is the ADA who is planning to prosecute, but his interest in Alice makes things complicated.  Paralleling that is the fact that no one really likes disco anymore, except for this small group of people.

The Last Days of Disco is unexpectedly charming and funny as it goes over the social mores from a generation ago, while young people make desperate attempts to climb the social ladder and still enjoy themselves for one night a week.  What I loved was that it championed optimism after all, even after disco was dead.

Mr. Jealousy

Written & Directed by Noah Baumbach (1997) Starring: Eric Stoltz, Annabella Sciorra, Chris Eigeman, Carlos Jacott

Lester Grimm (Stoltz) has the bad habit of becoming obsessed with his current girlfriend’s ex-boyfriends.  When he gets into a relationship with Ramona (Sciorra), he tries his hardest to not fall into his old habits, but when he follows her writer ex-boyfriend Dashiell Frank (Eigeman), he winds up joining group therapy under his best friend’s name.

Mr. Jealousy takes the cast from Kicking and Screaming but sets them into a slightly more grown up reality: they all live in New York, have jobs they either love or hate, and are searching for “The One.”  Lester and Ramona’s relationship seems smoother than smooth, until Lester’s following habit rears its ugly head.

If there’s one great thing about Baumbach scripts is that they manage to have intelligent people speak realistically.  The dialogue is still stylized, as all movie dialogue ends up being, but there are the awkward moments and the weird, inside jokes between friends.  In that regard, Baumbach is a master.  He also manages to make overused plots into something that’s fun to watch while his neurotic characters work through the phases in their lives.

Eric Stoltz is easily the most likable guy in the universe, even as a jealous boyfriend, and Chris Eigeman is still really entertaining as a witty, if highly disorganized and messed up guy.  The cast works really well together as a whole, maybe because they’ve gotten used to each other since Kicking and Screaming?  All the winning scenes for me happen between the guy characters, who are struggling to figure out what it means to be adults, versus the romantic plot.  It’s emphasized enough, I just can’t detach it from Lester’s personality rather than the driving force of the film.

Considering I watched in twice in three weeks, there is something in Mr. Jealousy that’s really entertaining, even if its just that seeing smart people live in New York and have problems, while God narrates from above (Have I mentioned the voice-over narration?).