Metropolitan

From the get-go writer-director Whit Stillman’s debut feature about a group of Manhattan preppies during the debutante season could easily be mistaken for a Woody Allen feature. There’s the opening credits on a black background scored  with a kind of swing jazz music and although the setting is the modern day, the immediate time period, Christmas, is perfect for evening  get-togethers in well-appointed Park Avenue apartments (well, only one really as that is clearly all that the budget ran to). The only difference is the actual choice of subject matter. Whereas Allen is resolutely working-to-middle class, Stillman’s film portrays the New York debutante scene through the looking glass of a small circle of well-to-do young people, plus one.

The one is Tom Townsend (Edward Clements), a serious-minded young man of limited financial means (the only character with any back-story, one assumes he is Stillman’s alter-ego) who falls in with a group of wealthy kids, members of, as one of the characters, Charlie (Taylor Nichols) puts it, the "urban haute bourgeoisie". They do the round of deb balls and then meet for after-parties in which they affectedly propound their views  of their world and each other. Which, bar the last fifteen minutes or so, is pretty much all that happens in the film.

It’s all very talky and the talk is quite mannered, a kind of St Elmo’s Fire as re-imagined by F. Scott Fitzgerald, but depicting a social scene so anachronistically inward looking that one feels that with appropriate adjustment  it could as well be set in the 1890s as the 1990s or anywhere in between (although not later).  It’s not Allen-witty but rather intimately “sociological” (to quote the film) in its presentation of  the self-conscious manners and mores of this group of kids to the manor born and sympathetic in its depiction of their awareness of the artificiality of their world.  

Metropolitan is an assured debut, impressively scripted and directed by Stillman and convincingly performed by a cast of largely first timers many not to be heard of again such as the two principal actors Clements and Carolyn Farina whilst Nichols along with Christopher Eigeman who plays Nick Smith would re-appear in Stillman's next film, Barcelona (1994),

 

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