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Boxoffice Movie Review
The Last Days of Disco
By Wade Major
**1/2

Chat-meister Whit Stillman's concluding chapter in his trilogy of yuppie gab-fests, "The Last Days of Disco," follows roughly the same pattern as its predecessors, "Metropolitan" and "Barcelona," focusing on yet another gaggle of interminably shallow, Ivy League pseudo-intellectuals as they grapple with love, life, meaning and the passing of an era during the early 1980s.

At the center of the mostly male cast are the film's two female protagonists, Alice and Charlotte (Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale), aspiring New York book editors by day, devoted clubgoers by night. The girls' friendship, however, is a fragile one marked by radically divergent sensibilities that seem to define the story's primary concern, namely the virtues of group social activity as opposed to "ferocious pairing off." Alice is sincere but insecure while Charlotte is blissfully conceited and self absorbed.

The supporting males fall more in line with the stiff, dysfunctional prep-school archetypes that audiences have come to expect from Stillman: ad man Jimmy Steinway (Mackenzie Astin), corporate lawyer Tom (Robert Sean Leonard), club manager Des (Chris Eigeman) and assistant D.A. Josh (Matt Keeslar).

When they're not shaking their booties on the dance floor, the trendy friends can be found engaging in idle chatter about everything from the psycho-social ramifications of "Lady and the Tramp" to post-modern reinterpretations of Shakespearean tragedies, occasionally taking time out to vent the romantic and professional insecurities that have become a hallmark of Stillman characters.

With the exception of Sevigny and the luminous Beckinsale, both of whom are outstanding in their respective roles, "The Last Days of Disco" offers little beyond the usual Stillman prattle -precisely the film that both admirers and detractors are probably expecting. As an added bonus for fans, characters from both "Metropolitan" and "Barcelona" appear in cameos.

Technically, "The Last Days of Disco" is serviceable fare, although costuming, hair and art direction could as easily pass for contemporary times as the early 1980s. Club scenes are also somewhat less than convincing from an auditory standpoint as patrons are consistently able to converse without having to shout over the music.

eye Weekly
The Last Days of Disco
Boogie Plights: Stillman on Austen and the healing powers of disco
By Gemma Files

"The biggest potential problem with doing a period piece called The Last Days Of Disco," says writer/director Whit Stillman, "was dealing with all these very 1990s actors who were utterly convinced that they would have to wear polyester suits with wide lapels and brush their hair like Farrah Fawcett. Their preconceptions were all based on Saturday Night Fever, which was late 1970s. When they realized they'd actually be dealing with the early 1980s, when new wave was making things a little more stylish, they were really relieved."

And there you have it, neatly embodied in one simple quote: clashing culture, clothes snobbery and circular conversation, three of the most basic hallmarks of a Stillman film, as already expertly established in both of his previous outings, Metropolitan (1990) and Barcelona (1994). Like his literary idol, Jane Austen, Stillman delights in juxtaposing light "social intercourse" comedy with meditations on morality -- thoughtful dispatches from the frontlines of sex and socioeconomics, where values like loyalty and friendship tend to suffer by comparison with the driving need to be part of whatever "in" group is going.

"Austen really had it all," Stillman agrees. "But what I admire most about her is how aware she was of her own capabilities. When Pride and Prejudice was published, she decided it was too light and fluffy, so she turned around and did Mansfield Park, a notoriously difficult book, in order to even that fluffiness out with some somber intellectualism. I think it's startling to have that kind of objectivity about your own work, and that's really what I aspire to -- to know what needs commenting on, and do it."

The Last Days of Disco, which began as a "commentary" on Barcelona's more contemporary disco-dancing scenes, is no exception to Stillman's rules. Its sprawling ensemble cast is made up of attractive, articulate New York WASPs much like Stillman himself -- and while its setting is "the club," a disco that everybody who is (or aspires to be) anybody must get into or die trying, its heart lies in the troubled relationship between college grads Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) and Alice (Chloë Sevigny).

Both girls are young, beautiful and upwardly mobile. But while Alice struggles to make up for having been a boyfriendless "social failure" in school, Charlotte pursues a policy of promiscuous pleasure-seeking -- while doing everything in her power to make sure that the more substantial Alice never gains enough self-confidence to outstrip her in the star quality department.

Although both Beckinsale and Sevigny are more well-known than any of his previous principals -- the biggest name in Barcelona was Mira Sorvino, who hadn't won any Oscars yet -- Stillman says he made a conscious effort to resist the casting pressures that come with a slightly bigger budget and more market recognition.

"Hollywood has an unfortunate industrial dynamic these days, which I think is pretty antithetical to the whole concept of an ensemble piece," he explains. "When every character is played by a star, the narrative tends to fall apart, because instead of paying attention to the story, people end up just sitting there thinking: 'Oh, wasn't Brad Pitt looking great!' Frankly, that wasn't the effect I was after."

Orbiting around the girls, meanwhile, is an assortment of guys who run the gamut from charming weasel -- Des (Chris Eigerman), the club's underboss, who seduces women and then periodically pretends to be gay in order to get rid of them -- to slightly used hero -- Josh (Matt Keeslar), an assistant D.A. investigating the club's business practices, who turns out to be both a disco fanatic and a recovering manic-depressive.

It's a complicated scenario, both hilarious and touching -- and one too large to be crushed into either a movie synopsis or a movie itself. As reported by Entertainment Weekly, Stillman has just signed with American publishing firm Farrar Straus & Giroux to write a first novel exploring many of the same issues, ones he felt his screenplay couldn't quite cover to his own satisfaction.

"Because many of the things I sincerely believe about the healing power of disco music seem so ridiculous to people," Stillman comments, "it was a relief to be able to put them into my characters' mouths, where they can at least come out as comedy."

He pauses. "Although I still do believe them."

Eyepiece.com
The Last Days of Disco
By C. John Yu

While other filmmakers might have their heads buried in sociopolitical satire, Whit Stillman is out there doing social scene satire. As the master of preppy angst, there's no better writer/director to do so. You might well credit Stillman's 1990 film Metropolitan with the recent Hollywood fascination with Jane Austen. The Last Days of Disco has sex, has drugs, has rock and roll, all generously served up with mockery that pulls back just in time before falling over the precipice of Zuckeresque farce.

It's the early 1980's, just before the phrase "Disco Sucks" rears its ugly head. We observe the mating rituals of recent college graduates in their natural habitat - the disco scene - where aspiring scions and debutantes from Harvard and Radcliffe embark on their careers of ambitious banality, liberally mixing business with pleasure, armed with their uncanny ability to intellectualize everything from Bambi to venereal disease (and stipends from their parents while they "make it" in the real world). While refusing to accept the label of "yuppie", these young and downwardly mobile professionals still refuse to give up the secret hope of actually becoming one (or at least marrying one).

Christoper Eigeman is back as Des, still playing the same character he played in Metropolitan and Barcelona. You can almost imagine Last Days as a continuation in the telling of the life of Nick and Fred. There are even some cameos of characters from the previous movies for hardcore Stillman fans. The film revolves around the mating aspirations of its two central characters, a rather naive Alice (Chloe Sevigny of Kids fame) and her social-circle-expert coworker Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale hardly recognizable from her recent role in Shooting Fish).

Stillman, ever insightful in his observation of personality quirks and how they function in social groups, fashions a world in which life consists of little more than working and self-consciously hanging out in night clubs. (Or working to self-consciously hang out in night clubs') That old nice guy versus jerk dynamic in the competition for women theme returns, as does Stillman's theme of social inclusion and exclusion.

Of course, as before, there is a faint background of position and class consciousness, but more in aspiration than politics. Even with the subplot of drugs and criminal investigation, The Last Days of Disco is as much about relationships and ambition as Jane Austen ever was, but far more bitingly so.

Mr.Showbiz
The Last Days of Disco
Kevin Maynard
Rating: 79 out of 100

If you're easily lured by the promise of elevator shoes and a soundtrack that features Sister Sledge, be forewarned that The Last Days of Disco ain't no Boogie Nights. Paul Thomas Anderson's kinetic depiction of the Me-decade was a breathlessly enthralling look at sexuality, pre-AIDS. Whit Stillman's new film, on the other hand, is as pointedly, well, Stillman-esque as his previous films Metropolitan and Barcelona'both dryly witty, talky ensemble comedies about rich WASPy kids afloat in the real world. But if you're up for it, Disco is also Stillman's most engaging and entertaining comedy yet.

The early '80s are under way. Shy, nice girl Alice (Chloe Sevigny) and cool, bitchy Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) are Hampshire College grads with low-end publishing jobs. But the good news is that they're now officially city girls, as Charlotte convinces Alice to go in on a cramped three-bedroom railroad apartment with the pretty but vacuous Holly (Tara Subkoff) in the Yorkville section of Manhattan. Both girls claim to be in pursuit of "group social life versus all this ferocious pairing off," but when they end up sexually involved with a group of slightly older guys from Harvard, they quickly change their minds. "Maybe in physical terms, I'm a little cuter than you," says Charlotte to Alice, as they begin an antagonistic game of bed-hopping. Basically, the girls share an affection for disco; they are a pair of straight-laced yuppie incumbents who like to mix it up at a decadent nightclub where they can mingle with wilder denizens without giving up their social bubble.

Once again, Stillman meticulously depicts the Manhattan social code with style and humor. Though he's not a visually inventive director (none of the scenes in the disco match the melodrama of the music by Chic, Donna Summer, et al.), he writes great comic conversations for these overdeveloped young minds (the best of which is a dialectic on the Marxist overtones of The Lady and the Tramp). He also couldn't have cast the film any better. As misfit Alice, Chloe Sevigny (Kids) is wonderfully duplicitous; though her meekness could easily be mistaken for naivete, she's actually the one character who really gets what she wants. Charlotte is more of a one-note back-stabber, but British actress Beckinsale (Shooting Fish)'sporting a seamless Yankee accent'is incredibly fetching and even sympathetic in the role. We actually believe that she has no idea of the extent of her cruelty.

While the film loses some dramatic interest when it focuses on the guys'especially during a far-fetched tax fraud subplot that's about as believable as the lame counter-espionage plot in Barcelona'it's no fault of the actors. For indie film fans, Chris Eigeman's character Des, a local club Casanova who breaks it off with girls by pretending he's gay, is the quintessential Chris Eigeman role. He's played these sardonic, deeply insincere guys in all of Stillman's films and in Noah Baumbach's underrated Kicking and Screaming. (For the art-house illiterate, he's even played a variation of this wiseguy in some West Coast Pacific Bell commercials.) But the scene-stealer of the guy group is Matt Keeslar (Sour Grapes), a mentally screwy assistant D.A. who champions disco as a great 'movement of ideas.'

For the most part, The Last Days of Disco succeeds as a witty portrait of the distinctly over-privileged and under-hip, which culminates with the mass burning of dance records in a 'Disco Sucks' wave at stadiums nationwide. And what a shame. As Charlotte remarks, the hippy '60s were all about changing the world, but people just didn't know how to dance.

Ekrano Magazine
3 June 1998
The Last Days of Disco
Ring My Bell
by Ann Gorman

There are those, I have learned, who find amusing or annoying my intractability as a film critic ' the fact that there's not a lot that gets me doing cartwheels. What's less obvious than this, though, is how much I often want to like something, how I walk out of theaters as if away from a bad breakup, wishing desperately that things had gone differently but unable to ignore the gnawing in my gut and sense of abandonment that scream out the truth. I make the allusion to dating purposely: longtime movie-watchers like me (and you') have come to rely on certain favorites for different kinds of emotional or intellectual sustenance, truly as if they were reliable old friends, as if we and they enjoyed a relationship. (Pauline Kael was the first critic unabashedly to discuss the seductive power of cinema in general; I can't think of individual films this way, though, because that can get exhausting. I'd rather just be pals.) Nashville, Paris, Texas, and at least two or three of the Thin Man movies are among those I return to regularly, I think for the same reasons that people mark and celebrate anniversaries: both to remember myself, fondly and nostalgically, as I was at the moment of my first acquaintance with them and to commemorate how far I've come since then, and with how much intact. I still have an overcoat I've owned for more than ten years, and although it's an understatement to say that it shows the wear, I can't bring myself to get rid of it, simply because it's carried me through so much ' every time I put it on, it's almost as if all the different ages of me, ever since my mother gave me the coat, are walking with me and helping to keep me warm.

For me, another constant in the periodic cold weather we all experience is Whit Stillman's first film, Metropolitan, which I turn to every year right around the first snowfall. Do you think I'm mean and nasty and that I enjoy eviscerating films that don't meet my uppity standards" Then I wish I could write you a review of Metropolitan, the one I would have written right after I first saw it. Here is a film that will go with me through the years and against the elements, I knew immediately. Metropolitan, written, directed, and co-produced by Stillman and released in 1990, is the modest tale of a group of New York City natives, prep-school acquaintances now in college, who gather at various social events during a Christmastime social season. Many conversations ensue about life, the future, virtue, Jane Austen, experimental socialism, families, and the nature of affection, with friendships formed and modest concessions made to accommodate them. "Conversations" is the key word; I remember one review of the film that swooned for its accurate and sympathetic portrayal of young people who unstylishly spoke in coherent paragraphs and sentences with dependent clauses. Every word of Metropolitan rings true, every characterization is dead-on; Stillman evokes the insular world of his own upbringing with love and pathos, fondness and nostalgia, and humor that defuses any misplaced solemnity. Its curious, timeless quaintness descends like a spell and lingers like a fable, and Stillman coyly acknowledges this quality before the action begins, with the onscreen caption "Not so very long ago." If I could write that review of Metropolitan, I would truly tell you the meaning of love.

It is with a heavy heart (and that old familiar honey-we’re-through stomachache) that I sit down to write, instead, about Stillman’s third and most recent film, The Last Days of Disco. The action concerns a group on the Metropolitan model, upper-middle class college graduates living and working in New York in the early eighties. They work for a publishing house, an advertising firm, the D.A.’s office: typical nice kids with nice jobs. The twist, as it were, is that this bunch loves the nightlife, they love to boogie – what they live for is disco and their disco-centric social lives. The film’s first problem is Stillman’s seeming indifference to the disco milieu; he maintains that Last Days was four years in development because he wanted every detail faithful to his memory of this period, but the audience can be forgiven for thinking that Stillman is the guy to make a movie about disco the same way Woody Allen should helm the definitive merchant-marines picture. The milieu consistently feels hollow and jokey. In the opening scene, roommates Alice and Charlotte (Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale) approach the discotheque on foot and take notice of the assembled crowd from a block away. "I hear it’s easier to get in if you come in a cab," Charlotte says. Stillman’s needlessly ironic tone, present from the outset, invites us to pull up in cabs, then admits us and asks to be thanked for the privilege – when we know the whole scene is bogus. Do the characters know the whole scene is bogus' It’s hard to tell. They’re more anthropologists than acolytes. One praises the new social model of the discotheque as being a place for "cocktails, dancing, conversation, and exchange of ideas." (Uppity gripe: if you went to a "disco," you would not have had "cocktails," you would have had "drinks." This is straight from someone I know who poured ’em during that same time period, who points out that the mismatch of "cocktails" and "disco" is equivalent to that of "cocktails" and "line-dancing.") Their objective and taxonomical approach is miles removed from what’s always been presented to us – and affirmed by its participants – as the era’s gleeful, no-time-but-the-present hedonism. To watch Last Days, you’d never get the idea that beyond providing an opportunity for sophisticated intellectual rapport and canny social maneuvering, disco culture was great fun. You watch Kate Beckinsale stride confidently onto the dance floor, and you see her smile happily when balloons fall from the ceiling, but she’s faking it, not shaking it. (The cast are all such bad dancers that we would have even laughed them out of our mood-lit high-school gym.) Stillman has overlooked the element of physicality which would have made the cast believable as editorial assistants and dancing fools. If his point is that disco had something to offer those who weren’t just in it for the dancing and irresponible behavior, he owes it to us to make clear just what that was.

A character, one of the film’s publishing drones, offers a prescription for a bestseller: "Create characters with whom the audience identifies, give them problems, make the problems big." Although the notion of a bestseller is later satirized, Stillman nevertheless swallows this bad medicine, throwing out ill-tended-to subplots concerning Swiss banks, venereal disease, a conspiracy, a corporate merger, drug use, and the eternal appeal of the good girl (a favorite Stillman theme: "a vision not just of loveliness but of virtue and sanity"). The arrogant stupidity of the characters, and Stillman’s preference for impassive direction, make all of this as unreal and irrelevant as the games of children playing house. The most authentic bits of the movie, and the funniest, are Stillman regular Chris Eigemann’s story of a traumatic college hook-up and the group’s ponderous, hilarious dissection of Lady and the Tramp as dangerous social propaganda. Many other screenwriters lack the nerve – or the ability to so precisely track a scene’s emotional path, to show a conversation’s impact on each person who participates in it – to have left out the irony here. Hasn’t anyone ever told Stillman that this is what makes his work so original? The oiliness of Last Days makes it indigestible to those of us who filled up on the brilliantly articulated sincerity of Metropolitan. (Barcelona, you ask? That was a tasty little creampuff.) Let us hope that The Last Days of Disco is indeed the end of an error.

New York Times
'The Last Days of Disco': Night Life of the Young: Urban and Genteel
By Janet Maslin
May 29, 1998

Leave it to Whit Stillman, in completing the beguiling, literate trilogy that includes "Metropolitan" and "Barcelona," to begin a film about the New York nightclub scene of the early 1980s with a caste of distinction and a lofty show of utter confidence. At a disco entrance presided over by the usual elitist doorman, Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) makes only the teensiest concession to self-doubt. She and her college chum Alice (Chloe Sevigny) decide to arrive in a cab rather than on foot, but that hardly matters; stunning, assured Charlotte might as well float in on a cloud. "We look really good tonight," she tells the less secure Alice. "I'm sure we're going to get in." She ought to be. Stillman's smart, patrician characters have their worries, but social acceptability is seldom one of them.

In "The Last Days of Disco," he is again concerned with the youthful malaise of the privileged, and he once again renders his characters' fretfulness in deft, funny and improbably touching ways. Wild nights of the disco age are not dealt with here, because this is not a film about wild characters. It's about tame ones who poignantly, in the brief spell of liberation between the end of college and the start of serious careers, may be experiencing more fun and freedom than they ever will again.

If this film, which falls chronologically between the other two, doesn't fully rise to the lovely vibrancy of "Barcelona," it still extends the witty, quizzical style of Stillman's social comedies onto inviting new terrain. In the works long before disco revivals became the rage onscreen, "The Last Days of Disco" is sincerely nostalgic without campiness. It sees nightlife as an escape hatch for straight-arrow revelers who loved the club scene even if they didn't attract attention there, and who could be labeled as yuppies if they didn't quibble about the term.

Young and upscale, yes -- but as one of the film's many talkative, hair-splitting characters points out, none of them is enough of a success to qualify as a professional. "I think for a group to exist," says somebody, examining graffiti that reads "Kill Yuppie Scum," "someone has to admit to being part of it."

Humorously and fondly, with an entertaining supply of what he has called "prosaic license," Stillman again displays a pitch-perfect ear for both the cattiness and the camaraderie that bind his characters into collective friendship. (The film inveighs against the "ferocious pairing off" that is sure to tear the group apart.) Weaving together the disco backdrop (clearly recreated as a labor of love) with more sharp-edged material about college graduates finding their first footing in New York and learning to cook with Campbell's mushroom soup, he creates a bright panorama of shrewd young strivers.

These range from the showstopping Charlotte, played by the English Ms. Beckinsale with a persuasive American accent, to Chris Eigeman's fretful Des, who works at the club. Having starred in each of Stillman's films (and characters from the other two make cameo appearances here), Eigeman makes the filmmaker a perfect mouthpiece who can brood amusingly about anything, no matter how petty. Here he plumbs the psychological subtext of "Lady and the Tramp."

Ms. Sevigny, of "Kids," is seductively demure and a perfect foil for arrogant, meddlesome Charlotte. (Ms. Beckinsale was Jane Austen's Emma for British television and displays that same high-handedness here.) Among the men, who sound alike and share the same persnickety thought processes, Mackenzie Astin plays a dancing junior ad man who wins points at work for getting clients into the disco, while Robert Sean Leonard makes a dashing environmental lawyer. The film argues that his generation's concern for environmental causes can be traced to the revival of "Bambi" during its formative years.

Matt Keeslar, Matthew Ross and Tara Subkoff round out the group of friends, while David Thornton plays the club's owner with suitable shadiness. As someone says about his now-quaint business practices: "To me, shipping cash in canvas bags to Switzerland doesn't sound honest."

Salon Magazine
Stillman flashes back to "The Last Days of Disco."
The Last Days of Disco
By Laura Miller

It's hard to think of an odder choice for director Whit Stillman's third film than a music-driven anthem to the lost heyday of disco, but oddness is Stillman's specialty. His first two movies, "Metropolitan" and "Barcelona," showed a sensibility already firmly in place -- droll, offhand, hyperarticulate and fascinated by the dynamics of group social life. "Metropolitan" has the tightest, most satisfying form: the sweet, brief arc of camaraderie among a klatch of Upper East Side kids during the few months of one year's debutante season. Stillman likes to savor the way a crowd of friends gels and then, inevitably, dissolves in the changeable time of early adulthood, and despite the brut dryness of his wit, he nurses a sentimental nostalgia about such losses.

In this case, the gang coalesces around Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) and Alice (Chloë Sevigny), two young women fresh out of college (where they barely knew each other) and working together at entry-level jobs in book publishing. By night, they slip into slinky, sequined outfits and desert their cramped shotgun apartment (Stillman's always been pleasingly realistic about Manhattan housing) for a Sybaritic nightclub. It's the early 1980s, and the princessy Charlotte couldn't be more pleased with the disco scene: "I think it's really important that a person be in control of their own destiny," she explains in one of many lectures directed at the reserved Alice, as she surveys the glittering dance floor. "We've got a lot of choices."

Those choices mostly include, with typically sly Stillman irony, men they knew in college: Des (Chris Eigeman), a cynical womanizer who works as the club's underboss; Jimmy (Mackenzie Astin), a benighted young adman whose career hangs on his ability to get his firm's dorky clients past the doorman; Josh (Matthew Keeslar), a freshly minted assistant district attorney with a nervous breakdown in his past; Tom (Robert Sean Leonard), a handsome environmental attorney; and, as a wild card, Dan, the co-worker who harangues the girls about their privileged background. Romances are kindled and quashed, triangles form and, in the background, Des wrestles with a burgeoning cocaine problem and evidence of nefarious doings at the club ("Shipping cash in canvas bags to Switzerland suggests illegality") and Alice and Charlotte search for the bestseller that will earn them a promotion to Full Editor.

All of this plot, however, only provides the scaffolding for Stillman's forte: conversation and the kind of character sketching that assembles an individual mainly out of quirks. The pleasures in "The Last Days of Disco" come when the friends rant and quarrel and sulk and circle each other with an unstable mixture of need and resentment. Des (played by Chris Eigeman, a Stillman regular and often considered to act as the director's alter ego) expounds irritably ("Do yuppies even exist? No one says, 'I'm a yuppie.' It's always the other guy") and gets into a long, hilarious debate with Josh about "The Lady and the Tramp" -- which is actually an argument about which of the two ought to be going out with Alice. The characters harbor crackpot theories, tell lies to make themselves seem more sympathetic and obsess about trivialities. Seeing "The Last Days of Disco" and revisiting "Metropolitan" eight years after Stillman made his feature debut is a reminder that observational comedy existed before a certain much-lamented sitcom. If Larry David were a WASP, and a tad less tormented, he might be making movies like Stillman's.

Or perhaps he'd be smarter and stick to TV; audiences like their sitcoms to be about friends but their movies to be about individuals and couples. Stillman's commitment to ensemble pieces and his leisurely pacing should relegate him to the art house circuit. That makes the musical aspect of "The Last Days of Disco" a bit more puzzling. It's impossible, from simply watching the film, to figure out how sincerely Stillman intends to valorize the era. While there are shots of characters walking into the club (gilded, costumed patrons, drifts of balloons and confetti showering down from the ceiling) with a guileless wonder blooming on their faces, there is also more than one deadpan speech about "the disco movement," including Josh's closing paean ("Disco will never be over. It will always live on in our minds and hearts. Disco was too great and too much fun to be gone forever") that reek of irony. As the end approaches, Stillman interjects documentary footage of rock fans torching disco records in a stadium and heavy-metal meatballs striding down the street in matching "Disco Sucks" T-shirts. There's even a scene where thugs (their motive -- whether related to the club's shadow business or its playlist -- is unclear) beat up Jimmy at the front door. Stillman is referring to all those movies set in nations on the verge of political upheaval (Jimmy compares the club's no-adman policy to Nazism), which is funny, but also tends to undermine any real wistfulness about disco's death.

When, at the movie's end, a whole carful of subway passengers joins Alice and her beau for an impromptu bit of boogying to "Love Train," the effect is startling. Oh yeah, you think, this is supposed to be a movie about dancing, about music, about a golden age of partying. Yet instead of leaving the theater with their toes tapping, audience members will probably find themselves inadvertently mimicking the way Stillman's characters talk, their distinctive, loopy patter. That's not much of a loss; I haven't suffered from a lack of anthemy dance movies lately, at least not that I've noticed, while amusing dialogue is always at a premium. In fact, there's something kind of sweet about Stillman's enthusiasm for the long-despised era's thumping backbeat, even if the rhythm of his own work is a lot closer to chamber music.

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