I spend the night after my loosely Scott Fitzgerald-inspired club night with a loosely Scott Fitzgerald-inspired movie maker.
I’m with TMC at the ICA, attending a screening of the 1990 film Metropolitan, though we’re really going for the Q&A afterwards with its writer and director, Whit Stillman.
I’m embarrassed – even ashamed as a Londoner – at what a poor state the ICA cinema is in comparison with the NFT. It’s resembling an aged regional arthouse fleapit, all scuffed black walls and crumbling heaters, and clearly hasn’t been refurbished in years. I don’t usually mind or even notice such things, but the print is outrageously scratchy and grainy: projecting the DVD would have given a clearer picture. They forget to switch on the sound until some time into the credits, the closing credits are completely out of focus, and the ancient Q&A microphone makes the voice sound worse rather than better, like an announcer at a rail station. There’s a line between being charmingly rough around the edges and just plain broken, and the ICA crosses it, at least in the cinema. Welcome to London hospitality, Mr Stillman.
That aside, it’s nice to see the film again, and Mr S gives a good little Q & A. I’m pleased to discover he’s like a character from his own films: well-dressed in a nice dark suit with a pocket square hanky in the lapel pocket, floppy boyish greying haircut, nervous and wary of the world. Clean-shaven, too, unlike the almost predictably hirsute trendy film critic who introduces him. For a man to be seen clean-shaven in the trendy spots of London is currently nothing short of radical. Trendy men have never had it so easy. It’s fashionable to let yourself go. Messy hair, scuzzy beard, trainers, jeans. As long as you don’t get fat.
Mr S is almost a foppish Brian Wilson. If he’d turned out to be a normal person, I’d have been terribly disappointed.
One to tick off the list, as Mr C says. We’re both big fans of the Stillman trilogy (Barcelona and The Last Days Of Disco being the other two), and 15 years on his work is still fresh and original. It certainly holds up better than Kevin Smith’s very 90s Clerks does in 2006. Probably because it was out of time even in 1990.
Very witty, very well-made and well-acted, and actually rather brave. He doesn’t pander in the slightest to the mythical target market – even the arthouse target market. Movies like Me and You and Everyone We Know are very much made with that audience in mind: quirky, wordy, quiet; carrot cake not popcorn. But Mr Stillman’s films are completely in their own genre beyond typical arthouse fare. Which takes some doing. No wonder they sometimes come in for some stick as ‘conservative’. Sometimes daring to be different actually means dressing smartly: see also the cover of Dexys’ Don’t Stand Me Down. You risk being laughed at at the time, but eventually people come round to you and hail you as a genius. (Can’t be long for me, I tell myself daily).
So, the world of Whit Stillman. No sex scenes or Mamet-like swearing. No masturbation references (which in a US indie flick is de rigeur). Instead, it’s quietly wealthy – yet all too inept – young Americans sitting around in a deliberately undetermined New York time setting (anywhere in the 1970s / 80s) talking in elaborate Austen-like sentences, and pretty much every other line is quotable.
“When you’re an egoist, none of the harm you do is intentional.”
“I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelists’ ideas as well as the critics’ thinking.”
“Her father died”
“That must have been awful for her.”
“Yeah… It was pretty hard on him, too.”
And so on.
One Stillman remark from the Q&A abides, mirroring the Quentin Crisp ethos:
“Your style comes from your mistakes.”
