Cinema Sunday: The Last Days of Disco

 

It's strange what films will find themselves on my radar and warrant my attention for 90 minutes or so. 

I stumbled across the last 20 minutes or so of The Last Days of Disco a few months ago. Something about the young men  and women in this movie caught my attention, a strange alchemy of passion and confusion that only the young can have. 

So I set up to record the whole movie and watched the whole thing in December. It was a week or so before Christmas, about 1:30 in the morning. I was wrapping presents. I hate wrapping presents. The Last Days of Disco was a strange choice for holiday viewing while engaged in an activity that I hate. 

Made by writer/director Whit Stillman in 1998, The Last Days of Disco is set in the early 1980's when the music scene was still in the 1970's clutches of disco. Our cast of characters are a mixed bag of college graduates falling in and out of love in the disco scene of New York City.   

Alice and Charlotte are poorly-paid readers for a New York City publisher whose social life centers around the New York City disco club scene just as it does for their friends and co-workers.  

Things get messy. Alice and Charlotte stake out the best apartment they can afford and still live in Manhattan. The apartment is cramped and narrow. Meanwhile, Charlotte has designs on a guy Alice likes while Alice indulges in a one night stand with a different guy while yet another guy is interested in Alice.  

By the way, Alice's one night stand was her first sexual partner AND he gave her not one but two STDs. Damn!  

Charlotte has a miscarriage and also gets laid off from the publisher. Alice gets to keep working there and even gets a promotion. 

And their favorite disco nightclub gets raided for tax fraud. 

Attendance was going down anyway. Disco ain't selling no more.

The heady days and the glamorous nights of disco are over. 

Film critic Roger Ebert said "If F. Scott Fitzgerald were to return to life, he would feel at home in a Whit Stillman movie. Stillman listens to how people talk, and knows what it reveals about them."  

The Last Days of Disco is a tangled web of interactions of characters who are seriously flawed and not always likeable. But as I struggled in the wee hours of the morning to get wrapping paper to fit around packages, this cast of young 1980s guys and gals held my attention.  There is a relatable sadness of watching Alice, Charlotte and the rest looking for joy and fulfillment in a world of mirror balls and throbbing base beats and not quite finding it.  

The movie does end of an unexpectedly uplifting note with a dance sequence that plays over the closing credits. 

The Last Days of Disco is part of a trilogy of films by Whit Stillman about young college graduates trying to make in the big old world while whining about their problems. The other two films are Barcelona and Metropolitan. 

The Last Days of Disco is not an easy film to love and the characters on the screen are likewise challenging. But it is an engaging in depth look at what make people tick and what prompts the choices we make about how we live our lives.