Late in Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress, the director’s long-awaited followup to 1998’s The Last Days of Disco, Gatsby-esque self-inventor Violet (Greta Gerwig) takes in a curiously signposting lecture on the dandy tradition in literature. The professor canonizes the witty, dialogue-driven, and dissipated Brit novelist Ronald Firbank as an overlooked influence on later writers like Evelyn Waugh despite his ostensibly minor imprint, rescuing him from the received wisdom that his work might be “too unserious in his unseriousness” to last. Reconsidered on the occasion of Stillman’s silver anniversary as a feature filmmaker, that throwaway bit can be read not just as a nod to Damsels’ whimsical dalliances but as his own part-wistful, part-hopeful mid-career retrospective — an acknowledgement of the modesty of his films’ footprint and their indelible mark in spite of them. The subject of a 25-year re-release courtesy of Rialto as well as a plum spot in the Criterion Collection, Metropolitan, like Firbank’s work, has its own champions independent of Stillman’s critical surrogates. But so delicate are its charms, and so opposite the critical afterimage of it as a frothy bauble among detractors, that you can’t help but want to defend it in all its sensitive frivolity.
Edward Clements leads a perfectly pitched cast of unknowns–who, for the most part, stayed that way–as Tom Townsend, an acid-tongued, Fourier-obsessed, working class socialist. Owing to his rented tuxedo and his rare appearance at a formal ball, the sort of thing he usually despises, Tom is mistaken for a blue blood on his way to the cab and whisked away to a Manhattan apartment by a cadre of upper-class college freshmen in evening wear. There, he meets brash but straight-shooting ringleader Nick (Chris Eigeman), the group’s unofficial philosopher Charlie (Taylor Nichols), and Charlie’s unrequited object of affection, Audrey (Carolyn Farina), an Austen-obsessed debutante who fancies Tom, unaware of his still-burning torch for his estranged love Serena (Elizabeth Thompson). From there, Tom is mired in a series of medium-stakes emotional bridge games as the bourgeois-sniping Marxist finds out that his class betters are really not so bad.
If the plot suggests a kinder b-side to Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charms of the Bourgeoisie — dismissed as an unfair portrait of the upper class by Charlie, who is far too earnest to go for such savage satire — what Stillman captures in this portrait of wan youth lounging and sparring together on fine couches is something rather more humane. As he would show in The Last Days of Disco, which envisions the early ‘80s as an apocalyptic moment for disco as well as its faithful adherents, Stillman empathizes with obstinate sorts who cling to the fineries and gentilesse of bygone days more than he satirizes them. Here, that consists of the already extinction-marked world of society debuts and aristocratic education, which Tom initially rails at, but which are essential to the flourishing of socially awkward, basically kind people like Charlie and Audrey, who’d flounder in a world untethered from uniforms and escorts.
To be sure, Stillman keenly registers Tom’s discomfort in his famously sparkling dialogue — “You’re one of those public transportation snobs,” Nick sniffs — as well as in subtler design cues, like the way the class aspirant hunches his shoulders in his thin fall coat while his betters amble comfortably in overcoats. But he’s no less attentive to Charlie’s gentleman’s outrage at having his emotional investments in Audrey undone in a single night by an interloper who professes to hate everything for which his hosts stand. Stillman’s sympathy for the rich has earned him conservative fans as well as progressive detractors, but his real knack is for a kind of clear-eyed nonpartisanship, which holds Tom’s diffidence in tension with his financial difficulties, just as it sees Charlie as both prude and prince.
The film’s crown jewel, to that end, is Chris Eigeman. The cast’s most successful export, Eigeman would go on to leave his mark in Stillman’s next two films and reprise an unofficial version of his gregarious jerk in season four of Gilmore Girls. Though Clements has the dubious honour of serving as our blunt and at times unlikeable identification point, it’s Eigeman who has the trickiest role, as a good-hearted patrician sort. Though he seems a bore at first, his Nick reveals himself as an unexpected twist on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jordan Baker, an upper crust tour guide who doesn’t throw away his new catch like a cat who’s grown tired of his ball of yarn but instead tells him where to buy a tuxedo secondhand, in hopes that he might not just pass in his new company but make a cosy little guest room for himself. That Nick exits the film earnestly entrusting the fate of the whole urban haute bourgeoisie — Charlie’s term for the posse, occasionally trimmed to a guttural uhb — to both Charlie and Tom is characteristic of the film’s prickly warmth, its seriousness about the potential of something as transitory as friendship as a means of bridging class divides.
In the course of his canonization — a la Firbank — as a minor American master, Stillman has often been characterized as something of a functional stylist, a distinctive writer with a straight-ahead, unfussy visual aesthetic. It’s true that he trends toward minimalism — thanks in part, no doubt, to the threadbare budget — but that standard line unfairly underplays his economy at establishing the comedy of manners for which he’s so famous. Consider the way Nick’s charge that Charlie and Tom keep up the uhb in his absence is neatly visualized in the smart two-shot of the unlikely friends perched side-by-side in the back of a cab, off to their nemesis’s house to rescue the woman they maybe, sort of love. Consider, too, the offhanded intimacy of his snapshot of Tom’s home life — furiously starching his collar or waking next to a photo of his ex and a Marxist tome on the nightstand. While Violet’s professor might fairly call the tonally unsteady Damsels in Distress too unserious in its unseriousness to merit a long critical afterlife, the same can’t be said for Metropolitan, which takes its characters at their word and develops them from caricatures to flesh and blood humans with real, if particular, wants and desires.
