The Last Days of Disco

Director Whit Stillman has been called everything from "the WASP Eric Rohmer" to "the WASP Woody Allen," although I prefer critic Hal Hinson's description of Stillman's oeuvre as "a cockeyed marriage of Chekhov and P.G. Wodehouse." A card-carrying blueblood, Stillman has offered us the Upper East Side view of the world in such budget-conscious movies as Metropolitan and Barcelona. Now, in The Last Days of Disco, he takes us to a Studio 54-like Manhattan pleasure palace "in the very early '80s," as Carter was giving way to Reagan. It's pleasurably disorienting to see the disco era filtered through the mindsets of young Harvard grads (and those who look down on young Harvard grads), but the movie only has something to say about...young Harvard grads--i.e., that they're just as dazed and confused by sex, romance and their brilliant careers as your average twentysomething. Chloe Sevigny (Kids) plays the Jane Austen-ish heroine around which the other WASPs buzz, occasionally moving in with their stingers. Like Chekhov, Stillman rues the good ol' days--in Stillman's case, before preppies swam upstream and became yuppies. Like Wodehouse, he plays it all for laughs, the only difference being that Wodehouse was hysterical. Stillman's amusing...at best.