The Last Days of Disco + Q&A at HOME

HOME have quietly scheduled one the best film events of the year as they host cult film director Whit Stillman following a 35mm screening of his 1998 classic The Last Days of Disco this July. Stillman is the writer-director behind Metropolitan and Love & Friendship and is known for his sharp, literate screenplays depicting the lives and loves of a social class referred to in the former film as “the urban haute bourgeoisie”, with an affectionate side-eye.

As the title indicates, The Last Days of Disco takes place in New  York in the early 1980s, as disco was losing its lustre and the hip crowd was starting to move on. And yet as with any scene, there are always people who don’t realise the end is nigh, as long as the cocaine is flowing freely and the music retains its compelling groove, at least.

Alice and Charlotte, played by Chloë Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale, work as readers at a publishing house and live a parentally-subsidised life in an uncomfortable New York railroad apartment. For them the club (unnamed here but reminiscent of Studio 54) is the centre of the universe, while disco is the height of civilisation and the thing that helps elevate them above the Woodstock generation, who couldn’t dance anyway.

As with any Whit Stillman film, the mechanics of the plot are secondary to the joys of watching the characters interact, fizz and collide like hyper-literate snooker balls

They’re joined by the likes of Chris Eigman’s club manager Des (a womaniser who breaks things off with a succession of one night stands by emotionally breaking down and pretending to be gay) and Mackenzie Astin’s Jimmy, a hanger-on who has to sneak past the bouncers for his crime of merely working in advertising. Then there’s Josh (Matt Keeslar), an assistant district attorney who provides the plot with both a romantic wrinkle and danger as an unforeseen threat to the club itself.

As with any Whit Stillman film, the mechanics of the plot are secondary to the joys of watching the characters interact, fizz and collide like hyper-literate snooker balls. The filmmaker is renown for his one-liners and the heightened verbal sparring which reveal him as an artist whose natural habitat is perhaps amongst the book stacks than the cinema. Which could be a problem, were it not for the fact that his films, and The Last Days of Disco especially, use sound and vision to conjure a sense of time and place so wonderfully.

What was a modest indie hit in 1998 has grown into a mild cult phenomenon, and is for our money one of the best films of the decade. Wistful, vicious and frequently laugh out loud funny, The Last Days of Disco is probably its director’s most breezy, endearing work and to see it from a 35mm print with Stillman himself in attendance promises to be a real treat indeed.