From LISTSERV@umdd.umd.edu Mon Jul 6 17:40:53 1998 Date: Mon, 6 Jul 1998 17:36:25 -0400 From: "L-Soft list server at UMDD (1.8c)" To: Larisa Kofman Subject: File: "FILM REV238" "The Last Days of Disco" A Film Review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL Whit Stillman's new film "The Last Days of Disco" has gotten a lot of very positive reviews in the media and is billed as a "story of two women trying to find love at the end of the disco era," so it seemed that it might be a good bet for this women and film segment. Not so. I think this must be the opposite side of the coin of those movies that the young male critics can't get into because they are about older women and written from a woman's perspective, e.g., "The Tanog Lesson." I couldn't get into this one because it's about rather unpleasant young people and written from a male or male oriented perspective, despite ostensibly being about these two women, Alice (played by Chloe Sevigny) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale). It's supposed to be a comedy, but it isn't terribly funny and the humor is always at the expense of someone rather than at a situation or turn of events. The people are shallow and not anyone I'd like to know. Actually, I did know people like these, not in the Studio 54 days of the disco craze in New York of the '70s, but their direct predecessors in the early '60s. Young people from comfortable upper or upper middle class backgrounds whose parents still send them allowances while they work at low level white collar jobs in the daytime and spend their nights partying at the "in" spots and putting their social life way above any other interests or pursuits. For a brief period I had one of these socialites as an apartment mate. When it came time for her to do her share of the upkeep of the apartment she'd get one of her boyfriends to lend her his cleaning lady for the day. She, like Charlotte in the film, was very attractive, very bitchy, had wealthy parents in Rye, and was hardly ever home. Once, out of some patronizing impulse toward the social zero she shared an apartment with (me), she invited me to a birthday party at the Stork Club (a gathering place for the "beautiful people" of that era) attended by her family friend ex-Queen Soroya of Iran, while Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis twirled around the dance floor. So I kind of know how Alice felt when she and Charlott get into "The Club,"--the 1970s version of that playground for the rich and famous or at least "in" crowd. Alice and Charlotte had known each other only slightly in their undergraduate days at Hampshire College and Alice, whom we presume is from a more modest background, is much less socially sophisticated. Charlotte is always willing to tell people what she thinks of them and she doesn't think much of Alice, but takes her on as a kind of a project, teaching her the tricks she uses to get men interested in her. Which, of course, fail miserably when Alice adopts them. Alice is the most sympathetic character in the film, but we really learn next to nothing about her, so it's hard to be very interested. The film tries to be a kind of satiric overview of people living through the end of an era, though it's also poking fun at how seriously they themselves take this turning point when the discos close down, not to mention how seriously they take themselves. I would guess that if you're in your forties and are male you may like this film a lot better than I did. If you're younger you may enjoy it as a kind of fun-house-mirror version of some members of your parents generation. And if you're over forty and a feminist, I don't think you'll care for i much at all. At one point Charlotte says something like, "Well, I'm certainly not any kind of a feminist!" You can say that again!. While many of us who listen to the Women's Show were out marching and bonding and creating the Women's Liberation Movement in the 1970s, people like these were out there at the discos and on the Long Island beaches holding up the forces of reaction and privilege. Not something I want to see films made about. |For the WMNF Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film. Copyright 1998 by Linda Lopez McAlister. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint or reproduce this review without the permission of the author: mcalister@chuma1.cas.usf.edu.