WHET METROPOLITAN?

one of my fav movies.

It's like watching a play performed live. It takes a few minutes to acclimate to the set and the actors and their manner of speaking, OP. If you don't hate it after 5 minutes, maybe you will love the film as so many do.

Whit Stillman's "Metropolitan", "Barcelona", and "The Last Days of Disco" are fantastic, great favorites of mine.

I think I will have to get a multiregion DVD player and buy all three as I haven't seen them in 7 years or longer, and they are not available on streaming where I live.

Barely two or three days pass that I don't think of one or more of these great films.

I adored it. Stillman is touch and go, but this one is perfection

I liked it more when it was called Mansfield Park.

I enjoyed Barcelona & The Last Days of Disco, but oddly couldn't stand Metropolitan. Just wanted to punch all the characters in the face.

I've always wondered if you really have to be part of/understand that NY upper middle class/rich lifestyle to really "get" it.

“ you really have to be part of/understand that NY upper middle class/rich lifestyle to really "get" it.”

They also want you to kiss their boys right on their mouths

[quote]I've always wondered if you really have to be part of/understand that NY upper middle class/rich lifestyle to really "get" it.

The film is set at Xmas1969, and I think that date accounts for no small part of the feeling and remove, captured glimpses of a social set that already had at least one foot out the door headed in another direction. To me, the main Metropolitan characters are all too aware of their anachronisms in a time of rapid and radical transition. They sound stilted because they have chosen to do, partly their transition into adulthood, partly a conscious class association with rules of behavior they were still discovering.

I wasn't from the same social and economic background, but almost a decade later people like the Metropolitan characters made up most of my university friends and, at age 17, 18, 19 we spent endless time in NYC at posh restaurants and watering holes and thought nothing of it. We had shaggy hair and and dressed in tatty college clothes preppy business wools and tweeds and classics, and wore good shoes or very destroyed ones. We spoke in long, circuitous sentences that came, eventually, maybe, to some very important point. We smoked fancy cigarettes from Nat Sherman and knew the lobbies and bars and restaurants of every good hotel. We met strange people and were invited places. We didn't sound quite so navel gazing as Stillman's characters, but probably we did quite a bit just with much less emphasis on debutantes. A decade made a big difference in many ways, and yet our language probably sounded almost as odd as the Met characters.

Having gone to boarding school the tone rings well true

Watching that forty years later begs the question...Were Preppies in the 80s simply very pale and poor imitations of Bright Young Things or characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald stories?

I think I know the answer.

Nothing ever happened to METROPOLITAN. It's a delightful, intelligent and very funny movie. The fact that the young characters are upper class is the point. These are people who have been gifted opportunities and choices, yet they are as unformed and confused as the rest of us are.

I love this film. The first time I saw it was on PBS. Whit Stilman was a self-styled oracle of the "downwardly mobile." About ten years ago, a documentary about the Carlyle came out. It set the perfect tone for a microcosm of Metropolitan. A class, a sense of dignity and meaning that was fading, as told by the people who witnessed it. Children of privilege had the "advantage" of growing up with these backdrops. A poignant point is made when a staffer recalls how a younger DJT visited the old hotel for an event and called it "a joke." Their grandparents were children during the F. Scott Fitzgerald era, and as family wealth fractured, experiences became outpaced by memories. Edith Wharton had hit upon similar themes. She wrote about the optimism and naivety of youth amid the backdrop of old-new wealth and declining significance. To be ambitious is to betray the civility that these kinds of kids were never supposed to have had to compromise. It's a story of futility amid generational loss and grief. These people would live the remainder of their lives steeped in a past they never really knew.

Thanks for this thread, OP.

Damsels In Distress is repeatedly recommended on a streaming service. I actively avoided it because the characters on the poster remind me of paper dolls and dresses like Zooey Deschanel in that period of time. I had no idea it was a Whit Stillman film! Has anyone seen it?

Chris Eigeman is a tragedy comparing how he looked then to how he looks now.

Ed Clements is now a minister at an evangelical church in suburban Toronto

R12 Damsels in Distress was a miss for me, it just didn't amount to much. Not interested in a gang of mannered college girls and their attempts to civilize the boys. Not much humor or even believable dialogue.

R14, seriously?

I watched Damsels in DIstress but would say that I forgot it almost immediately. I wanted to like it and didn't dislike it especially, but it was disappointing. I loved the long, startling and fiunny "who talks like this?" dialogue in Metropolitan, Barcelona, and Last Days of Disco. Unusual as it was, it seemed real. In Damsels, there wasn't any revealtion of a curious reality, just some random lines that might have been culled from Parker Poesy films, half-funny, imminently forgetable.

Right. It seems his time is past

Damsels has DL fave Billy Magnussen in the cast.

The redhead kid was bad casting. He was the center of the film but he was utterly charmless. Someone like Eric Stoltz would have been better.

1969?! WTF

R4 - I think we all concur that you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Mansfield Park? Puhleeze.