Metropolitan
Metropolitan is a film of nocturnal debutante parties, of young people who stroll and sip and sit with the swish of Christmas air. It is, in essence, a conversation sustained over several evenings about Fourier and bridge, about the morality of cab fares, about whether the surrealists were, in fact, social climbers. and it is, against all odds, utterly riveting.
the film's quiet, persistent genius lies in its use of contrast. Tom Townsend, our reluctant protagonist, arrives among this circle of wealthy young Manhattanites as a kind of anthropological accident a Princeton student of middle-class extraction who has been, in the parlance of the season, "deb untrained". he does not belong here, and everyone knows it. Including, perhaps especially, Tom himself.
and yet the film refuses the easy drama of exile or humiliation. Stillman is not interested in widening the gap, in staging the inevitable scene of exposure. jnstead, he allows his characters to talk, and in talking, to reveal themselves as something far more interesting than mere caricatures of privilege. their conversations are, to be sure, high-nosed, absurd, frequently hypocritical, one does not declare bridge a "cliché of bourgeois life" without inviting a certain gentle ridicule. but some of them know this. some of them are perfectly aware that they inhabit a bubble, that their use of French phrases and acronyms is a form of intellectual costuming, that their fervent debates about socialism are conducted in taxis paid for by parents. this self-awareness does not exempt them from satire, but it does grant them a measure of the viewer's affection.
which is perhaps why these conversations occur where they do. ghe enclosed, familiar spaces, living rooms, hotel lobbies, the backseats of cars are sanctuaries. It is comfortable here. the world outside, glimpsed occasionally through windows and doorways, is vast and frightening and full of futures that refuse to arrive on schedule. talks of what comes next, of love and vocation and the terrifying blank page of adulthood, are situated elsewhere, deferred. and the film, in its generous, melancholy wisdom, suggests that this is not entirely unreasonable. our expectations do not often align with our realities. living, most of the time, is just winging it.
I came to this film fourth, having started with Love & Friendship (which I now gather is not part of the unofficial trilogy at all), then Barcelona, then The Last Days of Disco. so I arrived at the beginning through the back door, having watched the sequels before the original, having absorbed the rhythms and preoccupations of Stillman's world in reverse order. this feels, I think, entirely appropriate. his characters are always arriving late to things, missing the crucial memo, attempting to decode social rules that everyone else seems to have absorbed in utero. to watch Metropolitan last is to join them in this condition of belated Ness to be, like Tom Townsend, perpetually catching up.
I laughed constantly. at Charlie's impassioned, almost existential defense of bridge. at the earnest invocations of dead architects. At the casual, devastating precision of Nick's asides. but the laughter is never cruel. Stillman loves these people, even as he documents their absurdity with the detached patience of an anthropologist. he understands that their pretensions are not fraudulence but armour, that their certainty is a performance staged to conceal the same anxieties that trouble everyone else. they do not know what comes next either. they are simply better dressed in their uncertainty.
and most of all, I feel better being a failure. this is, perhaps, the enduring gift of Stillman's cinema, that failure might be misdiagnosed. that the future remains, for all of us, a foreign country. that winging it is not a compromise but the actual substance of living. a striking film, a dear pleaser, a small and perfect consolation.